## 3 About Geographic Names and Gazetteers
### Generalities  
Indeed, in addition to a pure list of place names, it is necessary to locate them with accuracy and to assign them some features or geographic objects. Moreover, a place can have different names in different languages and different periods of time. Let us first examine a few well-known examples:  
* \"Mississippi\" can be the name of a river or of a state. * The city, \"Venice\", Italy, is also known as \"Venezia\", \"Venise\", \"Venedig\", respectively, in Italian, French and German. * The local name of the Greek city of \"Athens\" is \"A@iyao\"; read [a'@ina]. * \"Istanbul\" was known as \"Byzantium\" and \"Constantinople\" in the past. * The modern city of Rome is much bigger than in [PERSON]'s time. * There are two Georgias, one in the United States and another one in Caucasian. * The toponym \"Milano\" can correspond to the city of Milano or the province of Milano. * The river \"Danube\" crosses several European countries; practically in each country, it has a different name, \"Donau\" in Germany and Austria, \"Dunaj\" in Slovakia, \"Duna\" in Hungary, \"Dunav\" in Croatia and Serbia, \"Dunav\" and \"Jynab\" in Bulgaria, \"Dunarea\" in Romania and in Moldova and \"Dunaj\" and \"Jynab\" in the Ukraine. It is also called \"Danubio\" in Italian and Spanish, \"Tonava\" in Finnish and \"\(\Delta\)oova@nrc\" in Greek. Moreover, its name is feminine in German and masculine in some other languages. * Sometimes, names of places can be also names of something else; for instance \"[PERSON]\" can also refer to [PERSON] or anybody with this first name or last name. * In the U.K., there are several rivers named Avon. * Some place names are formed of two or several words; for instance, \"New Orleans\", \"Los Angeles\", \"Antigua and Barbuda\", \"Trinidad and Tobago\", \"Great Britain\", \"Northern Ireland\", \"Tierra del Fuego\", \"El Puente de Alcantara\", _etc_. * Some very long names can have simplifications; the well-known Welsh town \"Llanfairpwllgwyngylloggerychwyrmdrobwilllantysiliogogogoch\" is often simplified to \"Llanfair PG\" or \"Llanfairpwll\". * Some abbreviations can be common, such as \"L.A.\" for \"Los Angeles\", whereas its name at its inception was \"El Pueblo de Nuestra Sehora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de la Porciucnula\";
* Peking became Beijing after a change of transcription to the Roman alphabet; but the capital of China has not modified its name in Chinese. * In some languages, grammatical gender is important, so that place names can be feminine or masculine; for instance, in French, Italian and Spanish, names such as \"Japan\", \"Brazil\" and \"Portugal\" are masculine, whereas \"Argentina\", \"Bolivia\" and \"Tunisia\" are feminine. * In addition, as the great majority of toponyms are singular, some can be plural, like \"The Alps\"; but for \"The Netherlands\", the situation is more complex: plural in French (Les Pays-Bas), in Italian (I Paesi Bassi) and in Spanish (Los Paises Bajos), whereas singular and plural are both acceptable in English (The Netherlands are, The Netherlands is);
* Some places have nicknames; e.g., Dixieland, Big Apple, City of the Lights, _etc_. * Do not forget that in some languages, toponyms can have declensions, for instance for the Rhine River in German (der Rhein, des Rheins, _etc_.). Consider now the toponym \"Granada\": there are places in practically all Spanish-speaking countries bearing this name:  
* a small country located in the Caribbean Islands;
* in Spain, a city capital of the eponymous province, a few other places located in Barcelona and Huelva provinces and a river in the Vizcaya province;* in Colombia, three cities with this toponym;
* in the U.S., cities in California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, _etc._;
* in Mexico, a city in Yucatan;
* in Nicaragua, a city capital of the eponymous department;
* in Peru, a district. As a consequence, there is a very complex many-to-many relationship between places and place names (Figure 5).