Talk:List of city name changes

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I'm not sure that in this list should be names of cities that they had before they get city status (when they were villages). For example, for Russian cities: village "Alexandrovskoye" get city status and get it's new name "Alexandrovka" in 1926. Another example, more obvious: village "Zavoyko" was renamed to village "Yelizovo" in 1924, and long after in 1975 village "Yelizovo" get city status, so there was no city "Zavoyko" at all, only village with this name. The article title is "List of city name changes" so I guess here must be only changes of city names. In Russia, for example, there are a lot of villages that were renamed, it is also interesting information, but it should be written in another article, I guess. Tell me if I'm wrong, please. Maximaximax 04:01, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

One of the problems is that I do not always have information on when the city status was granted. Another thing is that most of the entities listed are technically not cities, but towns (and yes, I know that it is very hard to determine when a town becomes a city—I am generally looking at the 100,000 population mark, but that's pretty arbitrary and arguable, especially since no guidelines exist—after all, they are all just "города" in Russian). So, I was including all settlements that are, or ever used to be (like Partizansk), cities/towns, even if some of the name changes occured when they only had a village or urban settlement status. I did not, of course, include (or intended to include) the settlements that never had a status of the city/town—that kind of information would indeed overwhelm this article and does not really belong here anyway.

If you have any suggestions on how to overcome these problems, please share them here. I will continue as I did before—we can always clean the article up later if it becomes necessary.--Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 16:04, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)

May be we should mark villages with italic for example. Another problem - because cities were renamed not English, it's better to display orginal names and their transliteration. Another suggestion is to include years of rename also, like below:

1703: Санктпитербурх (Sanctpiterburh) > 1724: Санктъ-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg) > 1914: Петроград (Petrograd) > 1924: Ленинград (Leningrad) > 1991: Санкт-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg) = en: Saint Petersburg

Maximaximax 04:47, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Marking villages with italics is a good idea, but the problem of figuring out when a city status was received still stands. I just do not have this information for enough cities.

As for the original names and transliteration, I disagree. This amount of information would unnecessarily overwhelm the article. I would think that this information should go to the article on a particular city (see Adygeysk as an example of what I mean). In this case if someone interested in the Russian spelling of the city name can simply go to the article on that city, which should contain that information. Of course, that would require creating quite a few (now missing) articles (or stubs) on a lot of cities, but hey, who's afraid of a little challenge? One can also try the article on the Russian wikipedia.

Finally, I have a question about Sanctpiterburh. I never heard of this variant, yet alone that it was an official name of the city before 1914. And the Russian spelling of that name looks really funky. Can you tell me where this information came from? Just curious...

--Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 13:37, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

About sources to check the city names, city statuses and rename years: http://www.mojgorod.ru/ - very good, but unfortunately, not updated since 2001. About "Санктпитербурх" - try to search it in the Internet, for me it was also very interesting. And again - changes from "Санктпитербурх" to "Санкт-Петербург" cannot be shown using only English names, so that was a reason why I suggested to use local names. Maximaximax 14:58, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Change in jurisdiction

Many cities changed jurisdiction and thus official language, Gdansk has always been Gdansk for the Poles and Danzig for the Germans, no name change actuall occurred. see: Names of European cities in different languages. And how about Bozen-Bolzano that was simply Bozen before WWI? There are hundreds of cities that changed name in this way in Upper Silesia, Macedonia, and elsewhere. Andreas 00:03, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Greece

Many place names were officially renamed in the 1920's, especially in Macedonia and Thrace, but also in the rest of the country. This concerns mainly villages and small towns, whereas cities always had a Greek population and therefore Greek names that were used alongside Slavic, Turkish and other names.

The name changes were sanctioned by the Government and are documented in the Greek Government Gazette of the time.   Andreas   ^(T) 19:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Salonica certainly didn't always have a (majority) Greek population. At any rate, you should add these if you can find evidence. john k 21:46, 10 October 2006 (UTC)