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