Sir, - As someone who has spent nearly as long in the cartography business as Professor John Andrews, but at the cutting edge rather than academia, I must take issue with him when he declares (The Irish Times, July 31st), in pushing his new book, that the Ordinance Survey simply "tidied up and standardised existing spellings of Irish placenames".
Nothing could be further from the truth and such an averral, in a newspaper as widely read as The Irish Times, is a deeply offensive to people like myself who have been publishing Irish placename maps for years.
Does it still need to be said that the O.S. of Victorian times, by using the clumsy method of seeking to depict and convey the sounds of one language (Irish) with the orthography of another (English), far from tidying up, created a first-class mess, often distorting the sound as well as obscuring the meaning of about 1.2 million of our placenames.
Some of us have spent our lifetimes trying to tidy that up. - Yours, etc.,
Eoghan O Regan,
(For Learaid Maps), Glenageary, Co. Dublin.