PREFACE
Place names are lasting indicators of human culture. There are many examples of long-vanished civilizations and languages preserved in modern toponymy. Places are of course given names by people who inhabit them, but they are also named by those who visit them. It is thus not rare to find different names used for the same place in different languages. Long-lasting differences sometimes harbour deep historical cleavages and smouldering jurisdictional disputes - for example, one half of the world speaks of the Islas Malvinas, the other of the Falkland Islands.
Scientists need not attempt to determine what the "correct" name of a place should be and who should claim jurisdiction to it. They need only to be clear as which names are equivalent so as to eliminate ambiguity in their discourse.
One area where some confusion still reigned until recently was the Sea of Okhotsk, where Russian and Japanese names vied for broader recognition and where equivalencies and proper transliterations in other languages were either ambiguous, or at least, non-standardized. One of the recommendations of a workshop sponsored by the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) in Vladivostok in June 1995 was that PICES should "take the initiative to prepare for publication a complete list of nomenclature of bays, straits, currents in all the languages of PICES member countries."
In practice, what was required was a Russian-Japanese list of equivalencies and a recommended English version. The Science Board of PICES charged the Physical Oceanography and Climate Committee to carry on the task. What follows is the result of this initiative.
We must thank Y. Nagata and V.B. Lobanov, who both championed this initiative from the very beginning and participated actively in its implementation.
They struggled with variances in transliteration and spurious grammatical forms to end up with a rational and reasonable solution which will be a valuable guide to geographers and oceanographers interested in the Sea of Okhotsk, its shores and its physiographic features.
The "Multilingual Nomenclature .... of the Okhotsk Sea" is a good example of the mutually beneficial collaboration that PICES encourages among member countries. Thanks are also due to Y. Nagata for arranging its publication through the auspices of the Marine Information Research Center.
Paul H. LeBlond
Chair, Physical Oceanography and Climate Committee of PICES
