Beersheba

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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

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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