Using Foreign Letters

[mharky]

Sean, your totally right, it would be so much better for getting stuff in the press if names were in full (excluding the OC bit, or whatever...)

[EriOL]

At WOC this year I found it strange to see Tania Riabkina in the results - everytime she runs a race it seems to be under a different 'translation' (although I assume the change from Perileva to Ryabkina was through marriage when did Tatiana change to Tania and Ryabkina change to Riabkina).

Tania (or Tanya or Tanja) is just the semi-official nickname form of Tatiana (or Tatyana or Tatjana). The i-y-j confusion stems from the fact that there are several ways of transcribing the russian letter "Ñ?". The most common when translating to english is "ya" and the official Swedish transcription is "ja". The only thing that is really important to know is that Ryabkina only has three syllables: Ryab-ki-na and Tanya two: Tan-ya. The i-y-j is not a vowel!

[mharky]

I never knew you were such an expert in Russian...

[EddieH]

The Brits are not always the worst. Printed WMOC results have NEVER used correct letters EXCEPT when I did the entries in Scotland.

It took one hell of a lot of work in pre Windows computing. It was impossible to correctly get Portuguese, Polish and Norwegian on screen at the same time as they involved different character sets. However I set the computers with a Norwegian character set, and embedded printer commands in Portuguese and Polish names to correctly print them.

It was notable that when I received entries from countries with different characters although I always contacted them to let them know that if they let me have the real spellings they would be correctly printed, as far as I can remember only one person bothered to send me the corrections.

Regarding Club names, when I histed the Scottish 6 day prizegiving I added geographical location (in so far as I knew it) for everyone becuase I think it adds interest.

[taotao]

Personally I don't really see what all the fuss is about here.
Yes, it would be nice if everyone could have their names spelt correctly all the time and then Øysten (took me 40s extra to find an "Ø" and then he still was on the first page e.g. at opn.no) wouldn't be sad, but is it worth the extra effort from everyone?
My last name is Sjöholm, but it didn't take me longer than my first reply from UCAS (who got about 10 documents with my name spelled correctly) before I realised I'd be Sjoholm in Britain.
The official interpretation of my name in English would be Sjoeholm, but when trying to pronounce that, it gets a lot further from the real version than Sjoholm, so why bother?
Instead of trying to learn to spell new characters, I'd say put your energy on getting the ones you now correct.
(have for instance been named both Jan and John instead of Jon on loads of occasions).

About club names.
Saying where your from when going abroad is nice, but with a few exceptions (eg. SLOW, Euoc, Shuoc...?) I don't think people will recognice the places anyway. Better would then be just to make sure the organising club has a column for GBR and so on.
Also, if anyone asks me what (Finnish) club I belong to, I usually answer "Brahe", not "IF Brahe" and definitely not "IFB". I believe that this is the case for most Nordic clubs and to me it makes sence, so why not start to get rid of all those OC's/OK's?

...hmm, wonder who the Joker's are going to say they belong to?
[/i]

[HOCOLITE]

...hmm, wonder who the Joker's are going to say they belong to?
[/i]

Well lets see 'J's or Jers or why not just change it to JC's pronounced Jessies
I'm now hiding somewhere I don't actually know any JOK's so it's not personal

[graeme]

...hmm, wonder who the Joker's are going to say they belong to?
[/i]

We belong to the university where the apostrophe is used correctly.


Græme

PS. Scottish Power seem to think my initial is & .

[HOCOLITE]

[quote="graemeGræme

quote]

Are these æ Scottish letters