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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chowchilla" data-source="post: 3235211" data-attributes="member: 61100">I think what we are seeing increasingly is more accurate transliteration in English of words from other alphabets/writing systems that were not always transliterated accurately to start with; Lesvos being one of many examples.Take 'Beijing'... in old textbooks and atlases it was always 'Peking'. It took what seemed like forever for the old spelling to be changed in most instances to the 'new' (or more politically acceptable in China; irrespective of the fact that their main university is still called Peking University in English). The 'new' spelling is using the more universally accepted 'Pinyin' phoneticisation of the city's name; widely adopted in PR China itself. Even then it should really have the 'tone' marks over the vowels (something I can't reproduce annoyingly on my new Mac; on my old Mac no problem).The 'new' spelling more accurately reflects the actual pronunciation, however someone did mention that, in English, if there is another spelling that you have always used, then that is the correct one. After all, how many English speakers really want to see the place Japan changed to 'Nihon' in English? 'Japan' is a rather bad transliteration of the Chinese Mandarin word for the country -'Riben' in pinyin; 'Jihpen' in Wade-Giles phonetics- the latter was more widely used in the past for transliterating Chinese words. However, the correct name for the country in English is Japan, regardless of how this came about, because that is the generally accepted convention.Regardless of how a word may be pronounced locally, whatever the spelling convention in English, that is the correct one. If there are two accepted spellings such as with Lesbos/Lesvos, that simply reflects the fact that they are both correct, because they are both in use. We have no equivalent of L'Academie Française in English, hence no-one makes rulings on these things. I for one don't mind this at all because usage is the arbiter of language; something French speakers understand just as well, even if their L'Academie representatives don't necessarily always agree.</blockquote>

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