Talk:Kolkata/Archive 5

message: This is madness. The town formerly known as "Calcutta" is now called "Kolkata". That is its name in English. To call it anything else is simply a mark of ignorance. It is a change entirely analogous with that of Burma to Myanmar. The appeal to mass ignorance is very amusing. Most people don't know most of the things in this encyclopaedia. That's the point of it! The ignorant are still catered for. If they enter Calcutta, they will be redirected.Dr Zen 03:36, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree completely. If Peking is now called Beijing, if Burma is called Myanmar, there is no point in refusing to rename Calcutta to Kolkata. I can give a very good example ... before the early eighties, Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh was spelt as Dacca. "Dhaka" is more phonetically correct, and so Bangladesh Govt changed it to that spelling. For some time, some people outside Bangladesh spelt it as Dacca. However, check with google or whatever you want, you'd see if the previously-more-common spelling Dacca is quite unknown now. Only in older textbooks, 20 year old encyclopedias you'd find that spelling. I argue that the same logic applies here, if the Govt. of West Bengal has renamed Calcutta to "Kolkata" to make it phonetically correct, THAT should be used here. The renaming was done in 2001, and it's official and accepted by Governments of India and other countries, so for the sake of correctness, we should do the same here in wikipedia. If this is not done, then Mumbai-Chennai should be renamed to Bombay-Madras etc. 
As an aside, I don't think voting is going work either way. Why not follow previous instances (Bombay->Mumbai) and do likewise? What's wrong with that? --Ragib 05:19, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: Dr Zen, your abusive tone is uncalled for. You are coming very close to violating the no personal attacks policy. Can't you make your point without insulting people who disagree with you? -- llywrch 23:09, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kolkata 

message: I apologize for removing these from the intro, but they show up on my screen as a series of question marks, and so it looked as though someone had inserted them because they were disputing something. I'm using a Mac with OS 10.3.8 and the latest version of Netscape, 7.2. I did think it was a bit strange that someone would do that. Sorry. SlimVirgin 07:53, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
:It's totally understandable. What about doing something like this, which I saw at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Standardizing presentation of article title translations?
::Calcutta  is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Its original name was Kolikata (Bengali: ) and is, in higher literature, it is still referred to as such. Speakers of the region's native language, Bengali, have always known it as Kolkata (Bengali: ) and there is consequently no standardized phonetic spelling of 'Calcutta' in written Bengali. The city's name was officially changed to Kolkata in January 2001, though the British appellation is still used elsewhere. It has two well-known nicknames: City of Joy and City of Palaces. Sometimes, it is also referred to as the "Michhil Nagari" (মিছিল নগরী) , or the City of Processions, and "City of Bandhs" or City of Strikes.
:That way others who don't have the Bengali section of Unicode will at least realize what should be there. I'm not sure how good the bold looks on my system at least, so maybe unbold the Bengali? And having all those "Bengali"'s may be a bit excessive. — Knowledge Seeker দ 08:14, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Bangla fonts inherently have the trouble of looking "crammed up" because they are so super-artistified! So, making them bold makes it worse and writing Bengali so many times is, yes, weird! Plus it doesn't help people to actually see the writing if they want. Can we put a link to explain how to see non-Latin characters? -- Urnonav 08:19, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Bengali letters