"Arthur Figgis" wrote in message
...
On 19/01/2010 18:57, Charles Ellson wrote:
On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:59:18 +0000, Peter
wrote:

Charles Ellson wrote:

In other cases there was an established spelling but as applies in
this someone came along later and recorded/copied it incorrectly.
Rum/Rhum
Hannover/Hanover
Hazelton/Hazleton (Pennsylvania - allegedly misspelled in the
incorporation documents in 1857 and "it's too late to change it now")

Surely Hannover/Hanover is not a misspelling, but simply the English
version - cf Wien/Vienna and countless others.

IOW a stranger getting it wrong.

Was there such a thing as "right" at the time? And anyway, isn't it
potentially racist to suggest that a stranger's opinion is less valid than
a local opinion?

Admittedly nowadays in
many cases the "native" version is normally used - Brits used to refer
to Coblence, Mayence, Brunswick, Frankfort and the like.

With increased foreign travel or transport of goods it decreases the
chance of confusion caused by several versions of the same placename
cropping up from different directions. In some cases the reversion to
original is almost total; apart from Stornoway and the island names my
road atlas only has Gaelic placenames in Lewis/Harris.

And in other cases new "old" names are thought up to avenge some mythical
injustice or re-write an inconvenient bit of history.

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

I'm with you on that, mate. In our case, supposedly Aboriginal names are
used in place of "British" names. It's not convenient to be reminded that
the British took posession of Australia by force and by unintended
biological warfare. The indigenous peoples (who were never united) were
defeated in almost all battles, and certainly lost possession.

But the bleeding hearts within have proven an unassailable 5th column. The
result, money being thrown at useless projects and welfare payments hand
over fist. If we'd recognised possession rather than tried to exercise the
legal fiction of "terra nullis", perhaps more meaningful proogrammes could
have been developed during the otherwise idealistic period (the 1970s) - and
we wouldn't have the pandering to "sensitivities" that we have leading to an
insistence on "indigenous" names.


DW downunder