Time Commanders

[Arrowhead]

That Melvyn Bragg programme was great, especially the medieval stuff.

Getting back to the original topic, did you see this evening's TC? It was Cannae. Police officers were the contestants, and out of all the teams so far they seemed to have the best command structure and the best performance on the field. Having disabled the Roman cavalry more or less exactly as Hannibal did, they then unfortunately decided to try to just hold a line against the numerically superior Roman infantry, and got creamed. Still not a bad performance by comparison with some of the others though.
I can't believe the BBC are so tight that they even used the combat music from RTW! The music's great, I know, but you would have thought they would have done a bit more to prevent the show being just one huge RTW infomercial!

Yeah, they sorted themselves out all right but as soon as the battle started they panicked and the romans steamrolled over them.

[Kraxis]

Barbarossa, the problem with your stance towards names is rather simple. Should you happen to get into a discussion with locals about a place or person from their area, or even somewhere else, it is bound to get problematic. If I enter a trainstation in Shanghai and wants a ticked to Beijing chances are that the person behind the screen doesn't know what I'm talking about if I say Peking (and don't expect every chinese person to understand english so explaining that I want to go to the capital is out of the question). Of course this is only an example but it applies to plenty of situations. So do you really want to learn pretty much every name and place twice? I don't.

[HarunTaiwan]

Of course, Chinese maps have translated every foreign city using Chinese characters. These have to sound nice, and sometimes the translation is not close to the actual sound. Chicago and Los Angeles are fine examples.

Not to mention the old way of giving national names that are flattering..England is the Hero's Country, etc., but now they just do their best phonetically.