Talk:Drava

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[edit] Proper English toponym?

What's the authority for Drave being the proper English toponym as User:XJamRastafire described it in his edit of May 30, 2003? I note that the English-language link to MSN Encarta refers to the river as the Drava. Valiantis 20:29, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Further to the above, a selection of English-language websites from Google which use the term Drava. I've tried to note sites that refer to the Drava in regard to more than one of the countries it flows through as these should give the best indication of the current English usage: -

• Drava River Basin
• Encyclopedia Britannica article
• Danube Watch

There are far fewer references to Drave and these are primarily in webpages culled from Wikipedia itself and in Encyclopedia.com (Columbia Encyclopedia) and Encarta as well as other websites culled from these. Both the latter give Drave as an alternative secondary form.

Answers.com also refers to Drave as an alternative form of Drava but states the pronunciation of both is drä'və (i.e. drah-va). This strongly suggests that Drave is as much a non-English form as Drava. Valiantis 21:01, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

In the absence of any comments I'm planning to move the article to Drava on the following bases:-

• Drava is far more commonly used in English-language texts than Drave.
• Drava and Drave both appear to have a pronunciation of /ˈdɹɑːvə/ (rhymes with lava). The spelling Drava more closely reflects this pronunciation to an anglophone reader than Drave, which might be taken to be pronounced /dɹeɪv/ (rhymes with save).

Objections? Valiantis 15:47, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

No objections made.

I've done some more googling and note that Drave is used primarily in older sources - notably Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. More modern sources, as already mentioned, prefer Drava. The older sources also refer to the Sava as the Save, though Wikipedia lists this only as an alternative name. There has certainly been a trend in recent decades to use indigenous names rather than anglicised names (if indeed Drave is anglicised - see above) - one seldom hears reference nowadays to Brunswick (Braunschweig) or Leghorn (Livorno) (except where Canadian provinces and chickens respectively are concerned). It seems that Drave has fallen to this trend and I am therefore moving the page to Drava with an opening sentence: -

The Drava or Drave is [...] a river (etc.). Valiantis 18:37, 9 September 2005 (UTC)