User talk:Ben Qish

Beersheba

It's known as "Beersheba" in English (e.g. in most Bible translations, which is where most people first run across is), so I think we'll leave the article at that name. Noel (talk) 21:54, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

PS: I don't usually check other User_talk: pages (so that I don't have to monitor a whole long list of User_Talk: pages - one for each person with whom I am having a "conversation"), so please leave any messages for me on my talk page (above); if you leave a message for me here I probably will not see it. I know not everyone uses this style (they would rather keep all the text of a thread in one place), but I simply can't monitor all the User_talk: pages I leave messages on. Thanks!

That may be the case in Israel, for transliteration into the 'Roman' alphabet (it's not really the Roman alphabet, since that didn't include W, etc), but in the vast majority of the English-speaking world, it is not yet the case. E.g., doing a web search, for pages in English, we get:

about 480,000 for Beer-Sheva
about 1,260,000 for Beersheba

And of course in books, which have a longer lifetime, it will be skewed even further toward "Beersheba". When it is the most common form in the English-speaking world, that will be the time to change. ("Beijing" is a different case - the different transliteration system that results in that, instead of "Peking", is now widely used throughout the English-speaking world, so that now the former far beats the latter in a similar web search.) Noel (talk) 15:46, 7 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]