In Danish, my native language, the Faroe Islands is written Færøerne. In situations where only 128-letters ASCII is available, the three extra letters æ, ø and å are written ae, oe and aa, as can be seen from the wikipedia page "Danish". Actually I received the danish news in email for quite a number of years with all special letters converted by a program of the author, and then I had my own little conversion program to get æøå back again! Thus I would receive Færøerne as Faeroeerne. I think it is a bit of a curiosity that the correct English spelling (undoubtedly) is Faroe Islands, because the pronunciation is much more more like "fair" than "far". - Jesper -----Original Message----- From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu] Sent: Lunes, 27 de Noviembre de 2006 17:25 To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Cc: jonas.esp@googlemail.com Subject: Re: Faeoroe Oscar van Vlijmen <ovv@hetnet.nl> writes:

The English spelling is: Faroe Islands

For what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary prefers the English spelling "Faröe", with an umlaut over the "o". It gives alternate English spellings of "Færoe" (i.e., an "ae" ligature after the "F") and "Feroe". Presumably tz's "Faeroe" comes from an ASCIIzation of the ligatured version. Obviously none of these other names are suitable for the tz database. We are limited to ASCII, and "Feroe" (the only pure ASCII name) is rarely used nowadays, as the last OED example is dated 1855. Given its current popularity "Faroe" looks like the best alternative. I speculate that part of the problem is that the islands' name was imported into English before Danish was a separate language, so the English name is derived from Scandinavian (or perhaps Scandinavian transliterated into Latin). A confusing situation, to say the least. The OED quotes T.N. Annandale's _Faroes_ (1905) as saying "The Faroeman is by nature peaceable." Sounds like a nice place!