winter activity

Rodger Whitlock totototo@pacificcoast.net
Sun, 30 Jan 2005 16:26:18 PST
On 29 Jan 05 at 15:30, Jane McGary wrote:

> Arnold wrote,

> >I had acquired a colchicum szovitsii 'Vardaovit'.  Well I searched for the 
> >place know as Vardaovit and couldn't find it.  The correct name  is 
> >Vardahovit located in Armenia.
> >Do you think that the catalogs will be corrected next year?
> 
> 
> Place names in lists from the area formerly controlled by Russia
> (such as Latvia, whence this Colchicum comes to us) are often
> spelled differently than the forms in English-language reference
> books because they've been transliterated from Cyrillic alphabet
> references.

Some years ago while trying to identify a village "Basahid" somewhere 
in the Balkans, I ran across a comprehensive online gazetteer run by, 
iirc, the US Department of Defense. It included variant spellings and 
even dealt with non-Latin alphabets, though in those days the methods 
for doing so were rather primitive, pre-Unicode.

Worth seeking out if it still exists; try googling "gazetteer".

Sorry, but I have long since lost the URL.


-- 
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate

on beautiful Vancouver Island


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