Talk:Roosevelt River

"Roosevelt River?"

I have never heard it called that before. Its always called the Rio Téodoro. Anglicisation is all well and good, but its not like we call the Rio Grande the Great River. I really think this article needs to be renamed. KevinOKeeffe (talk) 23:35, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone have a source giving Rio Téodoro as an official name for the Roosevelt River? The U.S Board of Geographic Names (http://geonames.usgs.gov/) uses Rio Roosevelt and doesn't even list Téodoro as an alternate name. Brazilian government maps use Rio Roosevelt as well as far as I can tell. I haven't found any map that labels it as Rio Téodoro, even those labeled in Portuguese (though one National Geographic atlas spells it out as Theodore Roosevelt River). Kmusser (talk) 15:50, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

@KevinOKeeffe: Please undo your move. The Portuguese Wikipedia, as well as all other Wikipedias that have an article about this river, give it as "Rio Roosevelt". Ditto for the atlases I have checked. If you don't like the "anglicization" of "Roosevelt River", you can move the article to "Rio Roosevelt". Besides, "Rio Téodoro" is an impossible spelling in Portuguese; if anything, it should be "Rio Teodoro" without the accent. You must have seen "Rio Téodoro" in some French reference, as French is the only language in which that accent makes any sense! Pasquale (talk) 20:04, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

An anon had put in this article that Rio Téodoro was the official name and Kevin was basing the move on that, I asked the anon to provide a source but haven't gotten a reply - I'm suspecting it may have been sneaky vandalism, I'd be in favor of reverting the move. Kmusser (talk) 20:38, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Please do, if you can. (I tried, but it's not so easy.) The Portuguese article says absolutely nothing about "Rio Teodoro", nor does the Russian article. However, the German and Spanish articles both indicate that the river is also sometimes called "Rio Teodoro" (not however the official name). Personally, I have never seen an atlas that says "Rio Teodoro", always "Rio Roosevelt". KevinOKeeffe should be more careful about making such changes based on what may have been a prank. Apparently, he even went through the What links here pages and made the change in List of river name etymologies, a page that I watch (I have since fixed that), and I don't know where else. Pasquale (talk) 19:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Done, Teodoro is at least a variant name, google brings up tourist and newspaper articles that use it, but maps universally use Roosevelt. Kmusser (talk) 20:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I was the anon user who mentioned what I thought was the official name. I found a couple sources referring to a name change. See, for example, the 1914-09-04 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript, available here and a recent article (published before my edit) here. I believe I found some other mentions of the rename, but I'm not sure which of the ones I see now might have actually resulted from my edit. In any case, I was apparently mistaken about the current official name. Looking further, it looks like the river might have been renamed from Rio da Dúvida to Rio Téodoro and only later to Rio Roosevelt, but I'll leave any further edits to those better informed than I am. 67.160.84.83 (talk) 01:44, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

No worries, thanks for responding - the old name, before Roosevelt's expedition, was definitely Rio da Dúvida (and the U.S. still lists that as a variant name), exactly when it got renamed is unclear and there are sources that use Teodoro and Roosevelt more or less interchangeably, it may have been a name change that evolved gradually rather than an official decision, but since the government (both Brazil and the U.S.) now consistently use Roosevelt I'd consider that the current name. It would be nice to be able to document the history. Kmusser (talk) 20:21, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Did more searching and is murkier than I thought, I did find another officialish name change at [1], which I think I missed earlier because it uses Theodoro, which almost no other sources do, so it looks like there was some official renaming in the immediate wake of Roosevelt's expedition - when Brazil settled on the current Rio Roosevelt is unclear. Kmusser (talk) 20:55, 22 April 2010 (UTC)