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pastraga
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In the article about Marin Alsop and her new position with the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra the name of the city is repeatedly misspelled as "São Paolo", as if it were a mix of Portuguese and Italian words.

Martin Cullingford
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RE: Spelling

Many thanks - and apologies. All now corrected.

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otterhouse
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RE: Spelling

Now for once and for all; How do you spell Piotr Illich Tchaikovski?

Rolf

SpiderJon
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RE: Spelling

otterhouse wrote:

Now for once and for all; How do you spell Piotr Illich Tchaikovski?

Пётр Ильич Чайкoвский

:-)

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otterhouse
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Well, that actually works:)

http://bit.ly/fwbrs0

But what I intended was a sort of "accepted international" spelling.

Dutch, French and English all seems to have their own variant.

Rolf

SpiderJon
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otterhouse wrote:

Well, that actually works:)

http://bit.ly/fwbrs0

But what I intended was a sort of "accepted international" spelling.

There isn't likely to be one, I'm afraid.

Quote:
Dutch, French and English all seems to have their own variant.

Much like London is spelled in ways other than 'London' in different languages*, foreign names are always likely to vary, especially when they're transliterations from a different writing system (ie, Cyrillic in the case of Tchaikovsky).

* Landan (Arabic), Llundain (Welsh), Londër (Albanian), Londan – Лёндан (Belarusian), Londe (Limburgish), Londen (Afrikaans, Dutch), Londhíno – Λονδίνο (Greek), Londona (Latvian), Londonas (Lithuanian), Londono (Esperanto), Londra (Albanian, Italian, Maltese, Romanian, Romansh, Turkish), Londres (Catalan, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Ladino), Londrez (Breton), Londyn (Polish), Londýn (Czech, Slovak), Lontoo (Finnish), Loundres (Cornish), Luân Đôn (Vietnamese),  Lundúnir (Icelandic)  [List from Wikipedia]

(Peversely, Hungarian, that most 'different' of languages, spells it 'London' :-)

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otterhouse
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RE: Spelling

Even CD (DVD) companies have difficulties with the spelling :)

 

Rolf

Wigmaker
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"São" might also be considered a misspelling, as English doesn't really have diacritics. As no English speaker is likely to nasalize this vowel in normal usage, the tilde might as well not be there. After all, the hacek (or should that be "háček") is more often than not omitted from, say, "Dvořák" - even when the acute accent is written in. How many people write in the accents on Cádiz or San Sebastián, for example?