Oliver Pereira wrote:
We're after facts. And the fact of the matter is that anglicisations of names are simply distortions (or replacements) of foreign names. Calling Jo~ao "John" is just an *approximation* to the truth in the same way that calling a Jean Claude van Damme "French" is. It's sort of *nearly* right, but not quite. The job of an encyclopaedia should be to correct these sorts of approximations!
"Jo~ao" contains characters that do not exist in English. This is not materially different from words like "Tokyo" or "Osaka". They can not be written in English in the same way that they are written in their native language, because they use characters that do not exist in English.
I would argue that it makes most sense to call it whatever the people who live there do. It is, in a sense, *theirs*, after all. If there are several official versions of the placename locally, one could simply use the one that the largest number of locals use. We should aim to be most familiar with whatever is on the signposts, so that we don't get lost when we get there. ;)
Until people are willing to give concrete examples, it's very difficult to imagine what is being advocated. Japanese people do not call Japan "Japan". It's either "Nihon" or "Nippon". They don't call Mount Fuji "Mount Fuji", they call it "Fuji-san".
There are perhaps cases in which we should prefer something closer to the original than what is most common. In English, the name of Beijing is now "Beijing" where it was "Peking". Good.
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None of this really gets at the problem with Lir's behavior. It isn't so much that Lir was wrong about anglicization, although that's true too. It's that Lir was obnoxious about it, calling people who disagreed "racist". (And, by the way, Lir/Bridget/Adam continues to strongly assert that her opponents are racist in our conversations about possible reinstatement, which grows less likely each day, I'm afraid.)
It's quite possible for people to disagree on these matters in a collegial and intellectual way, respecting that other people have reasons for their opinions, and to work together to formulate a more sophisticated policy that appeals to all parties.
--Jimbo