Faeroe

[Jesper Norgaard Welen]

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 at cs.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Lunes, 27 de Noviembre de 2006 17:25
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Cc: jonas.esp at googlemail.com
Subject: Re: Faeoroe


Oscar van Vlijmen <ovv at 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!