David Gerard wrote:
On 06/08/04 23:18, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
For $deity's sake, the major dispute seems to
be over what period the
city, for
the purposes of the article, should be called Gdansk, and when it should
be called Danzig. There appear to be a couple of sensible compromises
that User:Halibutt has proposed. Why can't people choose one of
those, note in the article that naming is an emotional issue, for the
purposes
purposes of writing the article a particular convention has been
adopted, and this convention is purely a notational convenience and
should
not be taken for anything else?
At present we have a Polish partisan who considers "formerly Danzig" in
the intro to be DEEPLY OFFENSIVE because it was officially called Gdansk
at some time even further before that. Read the talk, he's serious.
Well, this has been discussed to death, and really he's just going to
have to live with it. For centuries "Danzig" was the common English
name for the city, and it still remains fairly common in history books,
well-known amongst many English-speaking people (I'd wager there's a
significant number of people who are familiar with "Danzig" but only
vaguely recall having heard of "Gdansk"), and is especially used when
dealing with the city's Prussian era. Offensive or not, it's a
historical fact. Certainly we can argue over when to use the various
names, but omitting the former common English name entirely is simply
not a reasonable option.
The talk page archives have about 10 pages of this issue.
-Mark