Soundex for placer names - what a great idea! Other than the complexity of how to pronounce all those foreign place names by their local spellings and how the system would be set up, it would be a great help. I finally found two small towns in Transylvania that I knew how to pronounce but didn’t know how to spell, other than how they would likely be spelled in German, because the family story was passed down verbally. Mind you, I was so driven to find these two little towns that I even dreamed about them in my sleep. Once  I figured out how to pronounce the language of their modern realm, I finally found them on a 20th century Romanian map (although not on a current one).



Perhaps 10 or more years ago, MapQuest used to be a wonderful resource for locating places that used to be (elsewhere in the world besides the U.S.).  I was able to input an old place name and several results would come up – which often included a modern day place name as well as similar place name options, somehow recognizing the language used for input. This was especially helpful for places that experienced political upheaval and changed hands in Eastern Europe. When transcribing oral histories of Holocaust survivors, I used this helpful resource to determine place names mentioned by the interviewees; the oral histories were not transcribed at the time of the interviews, so many of the survivors had passed on by the time I began the transcription process. Not long after that, I vaguely recall that MapQuest got bought out or something, thus ruining a very handy resource.



Leslie Wagner

Metadata Archivist

Access & Discovery

University of Texas at Arlington Libraries

817-272-6209

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From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hawkins, Susan A (DOT)

Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 8:03 AM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: Bulgarian place names



Out of curiosity, why don’t map librarians use the Soundex system for placenames? As an adjunct to regular search methods?



---Sue H, not a librarian



From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Virginia R Hetrick PhD

Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 1:46 AM

To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Subject: Re: Bulgarian place names





ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments or click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails.



One of the things we used to try in the Map Division when I was a student assistant there long, long ago, was to try systematically to vary and/or omit the vowels and to substitute Latin-1 characters for "equivalent sounding" Cyrillic consonants.  I used to do it as a list on a tablet to be sure I had all the possibilities before I started searching for the place name in the Office of Geography's gazetteers.  In my 2 years there, I resolved about 25 of them.

In the case of Lunedovo, I'd get started by substituting for the "e" only, then for the terminal "o" only.  Then, I'd try the combination of the "e" and the terminal "o" simultaneously. If that didn't work, I'd make up the complete substitution lists for all the vowels.  In my time doing this kind of search, I found that often "e" and "a" get substituted for each other and sometimes for or by other vowels.  I'd also try including "i" and "y" if the "a"/"e" swap doesn't work.  Finally, you might want to try "u" for the first "o".

Hope this helps.

virginia



------------------------------------------------

Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California

Email:  [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

"There is always hope."

My fave:  http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.jpg

There's no place like:  34N 8' 25.38", 117W 58' 5.16"

if you can't be at:  48N 7' 4.54" 122W 45' 50.95"

The US Naval Academy is back to teaching celestial

navigation, again!  "Why?" you ask.  Because hackers

can't foul it up like they can GPS.

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