winter activity
Rodger Whitlock (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