document_title: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

question_text: who do you play as in metal gear solid 2

text: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

text: Gameplay[edit]

text: Metal Gear Solid 2 carries the subtitle of "Tactical Espionage Action", and most of the game involves the protagonist sneaking around avoiding being seen by the enemies. Most fundamental is the wider range of skills offered to the player. The first-person aiming mode allows players to target specific points in the game, greatly expanding tactical options; guards can be blinded by steam, distracted by a flying piece of fruit or hit in weak spots. Players can walk slowly, allowing them to sneak over noisy flooring without making a sound, or hang off walkways to slip past below guards' feet. The corner-press move from Metal Gear Solid, which allowed players a sneak peek around the next bend is expanded to allow players to fire from cover.[1] Other abilities included leaping over and hanging off of railings, opening and hiding in storage lockers, and sneaking up behind enemies to hold them at gunpoint for items and ammunition.[1] Players are able to shoot out the enemy's radio so they are unable to communicate with others on their team.  The environment also has a greater impact on the stealth gameplay, taking into account factors such as weather, smell, atmosphere, and temperature.[2]

text: In Metal Gear Solid 2, the enemy guards are given more advanced AI "to prevent an imbalance of power,"[3] and unlike the original Metal Gear Solid, work in squads. They call on their radios for a strike team upon seeing the player, then attempt to flank him and cut off his escape while avoiding the player's attacks. Often strike teams will carry body armor and riot shields, making them a greater threat. Even if the player escapes to a hiding place, a team will sweep in to check the area. The game has a collective enemy AI,[4] where enemy guards work together in squads, can communicate with one another,[5] and react in a more realistic manner towards the player. The game's enemy AI was considered one of the best in gaming for many years.[6]

text: The game expanded its predecessor's cover mechanic,[7] with Solid Snake or Raiden able to take cover behind walls or objects and pop out to shoot at enemies,[8][9] while the improved enemy AI allowed enemies to also take cover from the player character. The enemies will often take cover to call for backup,[10] but during battle, they will take cover then pop out and shoot at the player or blindly throw grenades from behind their cover.[8][11] The game features a laser sight mechanic, where a laser sight helps assist with manually aiming a gun.[12] Boss battles and set-pieces remain a case of finding a strategy that bypasses the defenses of the enemy. However, in a major break from action game standards, it is also possible to clear the entire game, including boss fights, without causing a single deliberate death, through use of tranquilizer guns, stun grenades, and melee attacks.

text: Plot[edit]

text: Characters[edit]

text: The protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 2 is a young rookie agent named Raiden.[13] He is supported by his commanding officer, the Colonel, and Rosemary,[14] his girlfriend. Allies formed on the mission include Lt. Junior Grade Iroquois Pliskin,[15] a Navy SEAL of mysterious background who provides his knowledge of the facility and later revealed as the claimed terrorist Solid Snake; Peter Stillman,[16] a NYPD bomb-disposal expert; Otacon,[17] a computer security specialist; and a cyborg ninja imitating Gray Fox's persona, first calling itself Deepthroat, then changing its name to Mr. X.[18][19]

text: The antagonists are the Sons of Liberty,[20]  a group of terrorists who seize control of the Big Shell Disposal Facility, including anti-terror training unit Dead Cell, and a Russian mercenary force.[21] The Dead Cell team members are Vamp,[22] an immortal man exhibiting vampire-like attributes; Fatman,[23] a rotund man with exceptional knowledge of bombs; and Fortune,[24] a woman capable of cheating death by apparently supernatural means. The leader of Sons of Liberty claims to be Solid Snake,[25] previously declared dead after a terrorist attack, later revealed to be Solidus Snake, a third clone in "Les Enfants Terribles" project.[26] Assisting the Sons of Liberty are Olga Gurlukovich, commander of a rogue Russian mercenary army,[27] and Revolver Ocelot,[28] a disenfranchised Russian nationalist and former FOXHOUND agent, Solid Snake's old nemesis, and henchman of Solidus Snake.

text: Other characters include Emma Emmerich, Otacon's stepsister and a computer whiz-kid;[29] Sergei Gurlukovich, Ocelot's former commanding officer and Olga's father;[30]  President James Johnson, held hostage by the Sons of Liberty;[31] and DIA operative Richard Ames.[32] Liquid Snake returns as he communicates via Ocelot because his right hand, sliced by Gray Fox in the previous game, has been replaced with the right hand of Liquid.[33] The game also features cameos by Mei Ling, the communications expert who aided Snake in the first game,[34] and Johnny Sasaki, the luckless soldier with chronic digestive problems.

text: Story[edit]

text:
Metal Gear fictional chronology
1964 – Snake Eater
1970 – Portable Ops
1974 – Peace Walker
1975 – Ground Zeroes
1984 – The Phantom Pain
1995 – Metal Gear
1999 – Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
2005 – Metal Gear Solid (The Twin Snakes)
2007/09 – Sons of Liberty
2014 – Guns of the Patriots
2018 – Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
vte

text: Prologue - Tanker chapter[edit]

text: The game opens with a flashback, two years after the Shadow Moses incident in the original Metal Gear Solid. On August 8, 2007, Solid Snake and Otacon, now members of the non-governmental organization Philanthropy, are investigating the development of a new Metal Gear by the United States Marine Corps. Snake arrives on the tanker transporting the weapon in the middle of an attack by Russian mercenaries, led by Colonel Gurlukovich, his daughter Olga and Snake's enemy Ocelot, who has transplanted the right arm of Liquid Snake following the loss of his own in Metal Gear Solid.  After Snake knocks Olga unconscious, he sneaks down to the hold in order to record pictures of the new Metal Gear RAY. As the mercenaries take control below, Ocelot betrays his allies and shoots both Colonel Gurlukovich and the Marine commander. Just before Ocelot can commandeer Metal Gear RAY, Snake emerges and confronts him. Upon seeing Snake, Ocelot becomes possessed by Liquid Snake and escapes with RAY, leaving the ship to sink. In the aftermath, Snake is blamed for the disaster and is believed to have perished. The Big Shell clean-up facility is later constructed, ostensibly to help clean the Hudson River after the major oil spill that occurred due to the tanker sinking.

text: Plant chapter[edit]

text: On April 29, 2009, Raiden (who operates briefly under the code name Snake) is tasked under a reformed FOXHOUND. He has orders to infiltrate the Big Shell to rescue hostages, including the US president, from the terrorist group Sons of Liberty (whose leader claims to be Solid Snake), backed up by the rogue anti-terror training unit Dead Cell, who are also threatening to destroy the facility. All members of SEAL Team 10 are killed by Dead Cell members Vamp and Fortune, and the Big Shell is patrolled by the surviving Russian mercenaries from the Tanker chapter, led now by Olga, who is unaware of the extent of Ocelot's betrayal, and believes Snake was responsible for her father's murder. The remaining members of the SEAL assault team, Iroquois Pliskin and Peter Stillman join Raiden to disable explosives planted on the Shell by Stillman's former pupil, Fatman, now a terrorist. Stillman is killed by Fatman's booby trap in Shell 2, though he manages to warn Raiden in time, who successfully disables the respective bomb in Shell 1, preventing the sinking of the facility. Raiden then survives a direct confrontation with Fortune and Vamp, and kills Fatman on the heliport.

text: As Raiden searches for the President, he begins to doubt Pliskin's identity but agrees to the plan of transporting hostages off the Big Shell with a helicopter. However, they are attacked by the leader of the Sons of Liberty, who identifies himself as Solid Snake. Pliskin, however, shouts that the man is not Snake, and assists Raiden in fending off the leader when he attacks with a Harrier Jet piloted by Vamp. The battle ends with the Harrier being shot down, though it is seized by the Metal Gear RAY seen in the Tanker chapter, and the two terrorists escape. Pliskin reveals himself to be the real Solid Snake, who, along with Otacon, helps Raiden locate the President. When Raiden finally contacts President Johnson, he is informed that the Big Shell is a facade to hide a new Metal Gear. Known as Arsenal Gear, it houses a powerful AI called "GW", which is capable of controlling the transmission of digital information. The President also claims that the democratic process is a sham, and the true rulers of the United States are a secret organization called the Patriots. The President then reveals the leader of the Sons of Liberty is his predecessor George Sears, a perfect clone of Big Boss known as Solidus Snake, who fell out of the Patriots' favor following Shadow Moses and has now gone rogue with Dead Cell to escape the Patriots' control. Ocelot kills the President soon after this revelation. Raiden moves on to disabling Arsenal Gear, going to rescue an engineer, Emma Emmerich (Otacon's step-sister). After fighting Vamp, who seemingly drowns after being shot, Raiden rescues Emma, who agrees to help upload a virus into the "GW" mainframe. However, the upload is halted partway when Emma is attacked by Vamp. Raiden then defeats Vamp by shooting him again, although the injuries Emma suffers prove fatal. Otacon escapes with the surviving hostages, while Raiden is captured by Olga when Solid Snake seemingly betrays him.

text: Raiden awakens in a torture chamber where Solidus Snake reveals that he once adopted Raiden, a former child soldier, as his son during the Liberian civil war and that Raiden is now a Patriot agent. Solidus then leaves the chamber, and Olga steps in and frees Raiden, telling him that she is also a Patriot double-agent and that she was blackmailed to aid Raiden in order to protect her child. Olga also tells Raiden to find Solid Snake, who only allowed Raiden to be captured so he could gain access to Arsenal Gear. While Raiden makes his way through the bowels of the facility to rendezvous with Snake, his commanding officer, the Colonel, begins to act very erratically. Upon investigation, Otacon reveals that the "Colonel" is actually a construct of the GW supercomputer and that the partially uploaded virus is beginning to damage its systems. Raiden receives a call from Rose, whose voice begins to deepen and slow down as the conversation is cut off, but not before she reveals she is pregnant with his child. Raiden reunites with Snake and his gear, and the two then encounter Fortune, who fights Snake while Raiden searches for Solidus. He is then forced into a battle with twenty-five Metal Gear RAY units in Arsenal Gear. Olga protects him, before Solidus kills her, and captures Snake and Raiden. Ocelot reveals that he too is a Patriot agent and that the entire Big Shell mission was a carefully coordinated attempt to reenact the events of the Shadow Moses incident, for the purpose of creating a soldier (Raiden) on par with Solid Snake. Ocelot kills Fortune, before being possessed by Liquid again, who announces his plan to hunt down the Patriots using his host's knowledge and the first Metal Gear RAY. Snake escapes to pursue Liquid, as Arsenal Gear goes out of control.

text: The next morning on April 30, 2009, Arsenal crashes into downtown Manhattan, launching Raiden and Solidus onto the roof of Federal Hall National Memorial. Solidus attempts to kill Raiden, intending to use his nanomachines to lead him to the Patriots, eliminate them, and form a nation of "Sons of Liberty". At this point, Raiden is contacted by AI's of the Colonel and Rosemary, introducing themselves as representatives of the Patriots, who reveal that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how they could simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths. They order Raiden to eliminate Solidus, threatening to kill Rose and Olga's child if he refuses to cooperate. After Solidus's defeat, Snake reveals he planted a tracking device on Liquid's Metal Gear. Snake and Otacon plan to follow him, rescue Olga's child, and hunt down the Patriots, whose details were hidden in the GW computer virus disc. Raiden is finally reunited with Rose for the anniversary of their first meeting.

text: In a brief epilogue, Otacon and Snake discuss the decoding of the virus disc, which contains the personal data on all twelve members of the Patriots' high council. However, it is revealed that not only is one of the Wisemen's Committee one of Philantropy's biggest contributors, but all of them have been dead for about one hundred years.

text: Development[edit]

text: The creator Hideo Kojima's original design document for the game was completed in January 1999; it was made publicly available several years later and translated into English in 2006.[35] It mentioned that the game was originally going to be called Metal Gear Solid III to symbolize Manhattan's three tallest skyscrapers."[35] The document outlines new game mechanics and features, such as bodies that need to be hidden, enemies being able to detect shadows, lights in an area that can be destroyed to affect enemy vision, realistic enemy AI that relies on squad tactics rather than working individually, and multi-level environments that add an element of "vertical tension" to the stealth gameplay. It also outlines themes, such as passing on memories, environmental issues, and particularly social themes regarding the "digitization of the military," digital simulations, the "digitization of operational planning," the "digitization of everyday life," and the "effects of digitization on personality." The document stated that the "aim of the story" involves "a series of betrayals and sudden reversals, to the point where the player is unable to tell fact from fiction" (departing from the "very clear and understandable story" of its predecessor), that "every character lies to (betrays) someone once," blurring the line between "what is real, and what is fantasy," and "ironies aimed at the digital society and gaming culture."

text: The game's production budget was $10 million.[36] Kojima states that when he "heard about the hardware for the PlayStation 2," he "wanted to try something new. Up to that point, all cutscenes had focused more on details like facial expressions, but I wanted to pay more attention to the surroundings, to see how much I could change them in real time."[37]

text: Protagonist switch[edit]

text: For Metal Gear Solid 2, the established protagonist of Solid Snake was only made playable for the prologue portion of the game. A new protagonist named Raiden would substitute him as the player character for the main portion. The decision to introduce a new protagonist came from the idea of portraying Solid Snake from another character's perspective, but also to get around the dilemma of having to write gameplay tutorials directed at Snake, as Kojima felt that having to explain mission procedures and weapon handling to a veteran soldier like Snake would've felt unnatural after three games. The character of Raiden was created in order to appeal to female players after Kojima overheard female debuggers working on the first Metal Gear Solid remark that "games like that only have old men as protagonists."[36] Raiden's presence in the game was kept a secret prior to release, with preview trailers showing Snake in situations and battles that actually occurred to Raiden in the published game, such as a battle against a Harrier on George Washington Bridge and an encounter with the new Cyborg Ninja inside the tanker.

text: Plot changes[edit]

text: According to Kojima in the documentary Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1, the original plot of the game revolved around nuclear weapon inspections in Iraq and Iran and had Solid Snake trying to stop the Metal Gear while it was located on an aircraft carrier, in a certain time limit, while trying to stop Liquid Snake and his group. However, about six months into the project the political situation in the Middle East became a concern and they decided that they could not make a game with such a plot. The tanker in the released game is based on this original plot.

text: MGS2 was also intended to reference the novel City of Glass, notably in the naming of its characters.[38] Raiden's support team originally featured a different field commander named Colonel Daniel Quinn; Maxine "Max" Work, an Asian woman who saves game data and quotes Shakespeare, and William "Doc" Wilson, the creator of GW. All take their names from key characters in the book, and all three would have turned out to be AIs. None of these characters survived to the final edition, their roles being absorbed by other characters, namely the "Colonel Campbell" simulation, Rose, and Emma Emmerich. Peter Stillman, however, takes his name from another City of Glass character.[39]

text: A character named Chinaman, originally planned to be included as a villain, was later on omitted and his abilities incorporated in Vamp, namely the ability to walk on water and walls. Chinaman would have movements modeled after Jet Li and have a body tattoo of a dragon that would come alive as soon as he dove into the water.[40]

text: Significant changes to the game's ending were made late in development following the September 11 attacks in New York, where the finale occurs. A sequence depicting Arsenal Gear's displacement of the Statue of Liberty and crashing through half of Manhattan was removed, as was a short coda to appear after the credits, a breaking newscast showing the Statue of Liberty's new resting place, Ellis Island. At the point where Solidus dies, Raiden was supposed to have cut the rope on Federal Hall's flagpole, causing an American flag to fall over Solidus' body, and American flags that were supposed to be on all the flagpoles in New York were removed from the title.[41] The Japanese spelling of the name "Raiden" was changed from katakana (ライデン) to kanji (雷電) due to the former form of the name resembling "Bin Laden" in Japanese.[b][42]

text: Music[edit]

text:
TAPPY / Harry Gregson-Williams  "Metal Gear Solid Main Theme"

30-second sample from the main theme of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, composed by TAPPY and Harry Gregson-Williams.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

text: Kojima's choice of composer for Metal Gear Solid 2 was highly publicized in the run-up to the game's release, with him deciding upon Harry Gregson-Williams, a film composer from Hans Zimmer's studio, after watching The Replacement Killers with sound director Kazuki Muraoka. A mix CD containing 18 tracks of Gregson-Williams' work was sent to his office. Flattered by the research put into creating the CD (as some of the tracks were unreleased, and that what tracks he'd worked on for some films were undocumented), he joined the project soon after.[43]

text: In order to bypass the language barrier and allow the score to be developed before the cutscenes were finalized, Gregson-Williams was sent short phrases or descriptions of the intended action. The resultant themes then shaped the action sequences in return. Gregson-Williams also arranged and re-orchestrated the original "Metal Gear Solid Main Theme" for use in the game's opening title sequence.

text: Norihiko Hibino, who had worked on previous Konami games such as Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, was responsible for the in-game music. He also worked on the majority of the game's cutscenes, re-orchestrating Gregson-Williams' "Main Theme" remix for use in several sequences.

text: As with Metal Gear Solid, the cutscene music includes orchestral and choir pieces, while the in-game soundtrack is scored with ambient music. However, the score as a whole incorporates more electronic elements (particularly breakbeat) than its predecessor, in order to reflect the plot's thematic thrust of a machine-dominated society. Rika Muranaka again provided a vocal ending theme, a jazz track entitled "Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday", sung by Carla White. The game's music was released via four CDs: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Original Soundtrack, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Soundtrack 2: The Other Side, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance Limited Sorter (Black Edition) and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance Ultimate Sorter (White Edition).

text: The game's main theme was chosen by the London Philharmonic Orchestra for their Greatest Video Game Music compilation,[44] and the theme is a key regular in the Video Games Live concert when the Metal Gear Solid segment is introduced.[45] A segment of the song's main chorus is included in the closing sequence of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.[46][47]

text: Releases[edit]

text: In contrast to the original Metal Gear Solid, Sons of Liberty was released in North America first, on November 13, 2001. Because of the later release in the region, the protagonist switch was not kept a secret in the Japanese version in the weeks prior to its release. A preview event was held in Zepp Tokyo on the day of the game's North American release in which the character of Raiden was unveiled to the Japanese public.[48] As a result, the Japanese packaging artwork depicts Raiden standing prominently next to Solid Snake, as opposed to only having Snake like on the cover artwork used for the American (and later European) version. A questionnaire was also added in the Japanese version, in which players are asked about their experience with the original Metal Gear Solid and action games in general; the answers to the questionnaire determines the difficulty level of the game and whether the player starts the game on the Tanker chapter or skips directly to the Plant chapter (an option that is only available after clearing the game once in the American version). The Japanese version has a few other additional features over the American version, including two extra game modes unlocked after completing the main game: Boss Survival, in which the player replays through the boss battles from the main game as either, Snake or Raiden; and Casting Theater, in which the player can view certain cutscenes from the main game and replace the character models.

text: The Japanese version was released on November 29, two weeks after the American version. As with the original Metal Gear Solid, Sons of Liberty was sold in a limited "Premium Package" edition in addition to the standard release, which was packaged in a black box containing the game itself with a reversible cover art on the DVD case (with Snake on one side and Raiden on the other), a video DVD known as the Premium Disc, which features a collection of Metal Gear Solid-related commercials and trailers, a metallic Solid Snake figurine, and an 80-page booklet titled Metal Gear Chronicle featuring artwork and commentary about the series.

text: The European version, which was initially scheduled for February 22, 2002, was released on March 8, nearly four months after the other regions. The added features from the Japanese release were carried over to the European version, along with a new difficulty setting (European Extreme). The European version came packaged with a video DVD titled The Making of Metal Gear Solid 2. As well as collating all of the game's promotional trailers and a GameSpot feature on the game's final days of development, it features a titular documentary produced by French television production house FunTV, which was filmed at KCE Japan West's Japanese studio. The DVD was included as an apology to European consumers for the several month delay that had occurred since the original November release in North America and Japan, which saw numerous European gaming magazines detail the various twists in the game.

text: The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2[edit]

text: Released on September 12, 2002, in Japan and September 24 in North America, The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 is an interactive database for the PlayStation 2 that documents the development of Metal Gear Solid 2. It contains a gallery of all the 3D models of characters, scenery, and objects that were used in the game (as well as unused assets), along with corresponding concept art when available. All the real-time cutscenes (or polygon demos) are also available to view (without audio), with the option to pause them at any point, change the camera angle and move them frame by frame. Other content includes storyboards, behind-the-scenes footage, preview trailers, music tracks (with the option to play alternate patterns when applicable), the finalized screenplay, Hideo Kojima's original draft (available in Japanese only), a development timeline, and a gallery of Metal Gear Solid related products and merchandise. The disc also includes a sampler selection of VR training missions that were later featured in Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. In Europe, the disc was bundled as a bonus with the PlayStation 2 version of Substance instead of having a stand-alone release. It was also included in the Japanese 20th Anniversary re-release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in July 2007.

text: Substance[edit]

text: Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance, the expanded edition of the game, was released on the original Xbox and Microsoft Windows in addition to the PlayStation 2.[c] The Xbox version was initially released in North America as a timed exclusive for the console on November 5, 2002. This was followed by the PlayStation 2 version, released in Japan on December 19 of the same year. Substance was eventually released on PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Windows in North America and on all three platforms in Europe in March 2003. The console versions were developed internally by KCE Japan, whereas the Windows port was outsourced to Success.

text: Substance contains several supplemental game modes in addition to the main story mode from the original Sons of Liberty releases. The main game contains all the changes and additions that were made in the Japanese and European versions of the original release (e.g. Boss Survival, Casting Theater, European Extreme), along with further additional changes. Players can now start the main story mode at the Tanker or Plant chapters without the need to answer a questionnaire first and a new set of collectible dog tags have been added (exclusively on the PlayStation 2 version) based on names submitted from a second contest in addition to the original (2001) set. The visual effect for the thermal goggles was also changed in Substance and the FHM-licensed posters that adorned several locations in the original Sons of Liberty version have been replaced with public domain images (these were also replaced in The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2). The Xbox and Windows versions feature slight dialogue changes during certain control explanations in which the term "analog stick" was substituted with "thumbstick" (Microsoft's preferred term). The controls were also slightly altered for the Xbox version, due to its fewer shoulder buttons (clicking on the left thumbstick switches between normal and first-person view, while the Y button serves as a lock-on for the player's aim). The Xbox version has support for 5.1 surround sound.

text: The primary addition of Substance is the inclusion of an extra missions mode with 350 VR missions set in a computer-constructed environment and 150 "Alternative" missions set in areas from the main story. The player can choose to play these missions as Solid Snake or Raiden, with alternate versions of both characters (in different outfits) becoming available as the player progresses. These missions are divided into eight categories (although not all of them are available to every character): Sneaking, Weapon, First Person View (which simulates a first-person shooter), Variety, Hold Up, Bomb Disposal, Elimination, and Photograph.

text: The other new addition is "Snake Tales", which is a set of five story-based missions featuring Solid Snake as the player character. These missions are primarily set in the Big Shell and involve characters from the main story in new roles such as Fatman, Emma, Vamp and Solidus Snake, while one mission set in the Tanker has Meryl Silverburgh (from the original Metal Gear Solid) as the main antagonist. These missions, which are unrelated to the main story, have no voice acted cutscenes - instead, the story is told through text in interludes.

text: Exclusive to the PlayStation 2 version is a skateboarding minigame in which the player control Snake or Raiden in a pair of Big Shell-themed levels. The player has to complete a set of objectives before time runs out, which range from collecting dog tags scattered throughout the level to blowing up parts of Big Shell. The minigame uses the same engine from Evolution Skateboarding, which was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Osaka.[49]

text: On release, Famitsu magazine scored the PlayStation 2 version of the game a 35 out of 40.[50]

text: HD Edition[edit]

text: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - HD Edition was released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011 and for the PlayStation Vita in 2012. This version is included in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection but is also available as a digital download on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.  The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions feature an increased 720p resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio, providing a clearer and wider view of the player's surroundings compared to the original 480p resolution and 4:3 ratio of the PlayStation 2 version,[51] while the PS Vita version runs at qHD resolution.[52] Cutscenes can now be viewed in fullscreen or letterboxed format, while online achievements/trophies have been added as well. Most of the additional content from Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance has also been ported in this version, such as the Missions and Snake Tales modes, although the Skateboarding minigame that was present in the PlayStation 2 version of Substance is absent. The PS3 and Vita versions have a "transfarring" option that allows players to transfer save data between both versions through a wi-fi connection or a cloud network. The Vita version has touchscreen and touchpad support for certain gameplay functions such as switching between items and weapons or zooming into cutscenes.

text: Related media[edit]

text: IDW Publishing published a 12-issue comic book adaptation from 2006 to 2007, titled Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty, illustrated by Ashley Wood (who also worked on the comic book adaptation of the previous game) and written by Alex Garner. This version deviates from the game, where many scenes involving Raiden are substituted with Snake.

text: A digital version of the comic, titled Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée, was released on June 12, 2008, in Japan. Originally announced as a PlayStation Portable game, similar to the Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel, the digital comic was released as a DVD film instead. A fully voiced version of the graphic novel adaptation of the first Metal Gear Solid is featured as well.[53]

text: A novelization of the game written by Raymond Benson and published by Del Rey. The American paperback edition was published on November 24, 2009. A majority of the character interaction in the novel is taken verbatim from the Codec conversations in the game itself.

text: A second novelization by Kenji Yano (written under the pen name Hitori Nojima), titled Metal Gear Solid Substance II, was published by Kadokawa Shoten in Japan on September 24, 2015.[54] This novelization is narrated in real time during the events of the Plant chapter from the perspective of a young man living Manhattan.

text: Reception[edit]

text: Critical response[edit]

text: ReceptionAggregate scoresAggregatorScoreGameRankings95%[55]Metacritic96/100[56]Review scoresPublicationScoreAllGame[57][58]CVG9/10Edge8/10[59]EGM38.5/40[56]Famitsu38/40[60][61]Game Informer10/10[55]GamePro[62]Game RevolutionA[55]GamesMaster96%[55]GameSpot9.6/10[63]GameSpy[64]GamesRadar+96/100[56]GameZone9.8/10[65]IGN9.7/10[66]OPM (US)[55]OPM (UK)10/10[67]PSM10/10[55]PSM396%[55]AwardsPublicationAwardGame InformerGame of the Year[68]CESA AwardExcellence Award[69]EdgeInnovation of the Year[69]

text: As a result of promising trailers and the huge commercial success of its predecessor Metal Gear Solid, there was a high level of anticipation in the gaming community surrounding the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.[70] The game's E3 2000 demo, surprised many spectators with its level of realism and played a key role in the PlayStation 2 console's early success.[71]

text: In the United States, the game sold 500,000 units within two days of release, and 680,000 copies within five.[72] By July 2006, it had sold 2 million copies and earned $85 million in the United States alone. Next Generation ranked it as the 16th highest-selling game launched for the PlayStation 2, Xbox or GameCube between January 2000 and July 2006 in that country.[73] In Japan, the game sold 400,000 units in its first day, in addition to its 600,000 pre-orders in that country.[72] The game's PlayStation 2 version received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[74] indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom.[75] It ultimately sold 7 million copies worldwide,[76] making it the highest-selling game in the series.

text: Metal Gear Solid 2 received a critical average of 96% on Metacritic, where it is the fourth highest-rated game on the PlayStation 2,[77] and the tied sixth highest-rated game of all time.[78] Game Informer gave the game a score of 10/10 (notably, this is the second game Game Informer ever gave a 10/10 score), and it received high reviews from nearly all major publications and websites. GameSpot gave the game a high 9.6 rating, stating, "It boils down to this: You must play Metal Gear Solid 2".[63] Critics praised the title's stealth gameplay and the improvements over its predecessor, as well as the game's level of graphical detail, particularly in the use of in-game graphics to render plot-driving cutscenes.[79]

text: The game was critically acclaimed, gaining a 95.09% and 96/100 aggregate at rating websites GameRankings and Metacritic respectively, the highest score for a Metal Gear Solid game on both websites.[55][56] The title's storyline, however, was initially divisive[80] and became the source of controversy. The storyline explores many social, philosophical and cyberpunk themes in great detail, including meme theory, social engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence, information control, conspiracy theories, political and military maneuvering, evolution, existentialism, censorship, the nature of reality,[81][82][83][84][85][86] post-truth politics,[87] child exploitation,[88] and taboos such as incest[89] and sexual orientation.[90] Hideo Kojima's ambitious script has been praised, some even calling it the first example of a postmodern video game.[81][82][83][91][92][93][94] However, some critics considered the plot to be "incomprehensible" and overly heavy for an action game, and also felt that the lengthy dialogue sections heavily disrupted the gameplay and that the dialogue itself was overly disjointed and convoluted.[95][96] The surprise introduction of Raiden as the protagonist for the majority of the game (replacing long-time series protagonist Solid Snake) was also controversial with fans of Metal Gear Solid.[83]

text: Awards[edit]

text:
E3 2000 Game Critics Awards: "Special Commendation for Graphics"[97]
E3 2001 Game Critics Awards: "Best Console Game", "Best Action/Adventure Game"[98]
Edge: "Innovation of the Year"[69]
IGN Best of 2001: "Best Graphics", "Best Sound", "Best Story"
Game Informer 2001 Game of the Year Awards: "Game of the Year"[68]
GameSpot 2001 Game of the Year Awards: "Best Music", "Biggest Surprise"
GameSpy 2001 Game Awards: "Best PS2 Action/Adventure Game", "Reader's Choice PS2 Game of the Year", "Best In-Game Cinematics", "Best Force Feedback"
Japan Game Awards 2001-2002: "Excellence Award"[69]
Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences 2002: "Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design"[99]

text: Retrospective analysis[edit]

text: Metal Gear Solid 2 is often considered the first example of a postmodern video game[81][91][92] and has often been cited as a primary example of artistic expression in video games.[81][82][92][93] In his paper How Videogames Express Ideas, Matthew Weise of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described  Sons of Liberty as "perhaps the most vivid example of a game that uses tension between different levels of player agency to fuel a multi-faceted ideological argument," noting Solidus Snake's suggestion of the United States being a "totalitarian regime of thought control" and pointing to the "very meta concept" of "how the designer’s imposed plan or path for the player maps to the tyrannical nature of the government", where, "like the player, Jack has no agency other than what his puppet masters give him."[82] In the book Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, Tanner Higgin examined the game's "resistant and subversive counter-history of military engagement," describing its "convoluted narrative and unconventional gameplay logics" as a "critique" of "the very networks of biopolitical and informational control that comprise the postmodern military, and posthumanity generally," and noting that it "purposefully manufactures frustration and negative affect" to "highlight the typically unexamined codes, conventions, and hidden pleasures of the military game genre."[100]

text: Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com notes that "Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game built on misinformation" and that it "was simply too avant-garde—too clever—for its own good."[101] Steven Poole commented in a 2012 Edge column, "the story of MGS2, with its mythic wit and sweep, is still in a different league from the vast majority of videogame yarns. ... [H]owever, the fact that MGS2 still seems so avant-garde today might well prompt a worry: does it represent the pinnacle of a now-vanished era, the age of the experimental mainstream? This was, after all, a big-budget commercial boxed product that gleefully took risks and subverted genre conventions at every turn. Modern blockbuster games play it painfully safe by comparison."[102] Gamasutra has compared the game's themes to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as the more recent social media and social gaming trends.[103]

text: Fifteen years after its original release, Alex Wiltshire of Glixel found the game to be "strangely prescient of not only its own time but also today", noting how it dodged "truth at every turn" and comparing it to post-truth politics, Facebook's curated News Feed, and the 2016 United States presidential election.[87] Nicholas Montegriffo of Moviepilot further draws comparisons to contemporary concepts such as fake news, echo chambers and alternative facts.[104] According to Cameron Kunzelman of Vice, Metal Gear Solid 2 is still politically relevant in 2017.[105] In March 2018, GamesRadar drew comparisons to recent political events including the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the investigations involving Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[106]

text: Impact[edit]

text: In a 2006 viewer poll conducted by Japan's Famitsu magazine of top 100 games of all time, Metal Gear Solid 2 was ranked at #42 in the poll.[107] In the 200th issue of Game Informer Magazine in 2009, its list of top 200 games of all time ranked the game at #50 on the list.[108] Metal Gear Solid 2 was ranked #7 in Game Informer's 2008 list of the top ten video game openings.[109] In 2010, GamesRadar included the game in its list of top seven games "with mega plot twists you never saw coming."[110] The game was included in Tony Mott and Peter Molyneux's 2011 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.[111] It has also been listed as one of the best games of all time by Electronic Gaming Monthly,[112] Empire,[113][114] GameFAQs,[115][116][117][118] GameRankings,[119] IGN,[120][121][122] Metacritic,[78] Slant,[123] and Stuff.[124][125]

text: In 2009, Wired included the game in its list of "The 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade" at #13, concluding that every "videogame story that subverts a player’s expectations owes a debt to the ground broken by Metal Gear Solid 2."[126] The artistic influence of Metal Gear Solid 2 can be seen in later video games such as Goichi Suda's similarly postmodern game Killer7,[91] the similarly metanarrative game Portal,[127] the survival horror title Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and particularly the first-person shooter BioShock,[128] which featured a similar plot twist to Metal Gear Solid 2.[129] Several game mechanics developed in Metal Gear Solid 2, such as the cover system and laser sight mechanic, have since become staples of stealth games as well as shooters, including Kill Switch (2003), Resident Evil 4 (2005) and Gears of War (2006).[7][12] According to Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 2 paid more "attention to the surroundings" in real-time and later "games like Call of Duty have followed this trend of making your surroundings more realistic."[37]

text: The early anticipation that surrounded Metal Gear Solid 2 since its E3 2000 demo has also been credited as a key factor in the PlayStation 2's best-selling success and dominance during the sixth console generation, as well as the demise of Sega's Dreamcast.[71] According to John Szczepaniak, "MGS2 was the game which single-handedly sold Sony's new PlayStation 2 to the masses."[130] MGS2, along with its predecessor, has been featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition The Art of Video Games in 2012.[131]


document_title: Hepatic portal system

question_text: where does the venous blood go after leaving the small intestine

root

text: Hepatic portal system

text: Function[edit]

text: The portal venous system is responsible for directing blood from parts of the gastrointestinal tract to the liver. Substances absorbed in the small intestine travel first to the liver for processing before continuing to the heart. Not all of the gastrointestinal tract is part of this system. The system extends from about the lower portion of the esophagus to the upper part of the anal canal. It also includes venous drainage from the spleen and pancreas.

tag: p

text: Many drugs that are absorbed through the GI tract are substantially metabolized by the liver before reaching general circulation. This is known as the first pass effect. As a consequence, certain drugs can only be taken via certain routes. For example, nitroglycerin cannot be swallowed because the liver would inactivate the medication, but it can be taken under the tongue or transdermal (through the skin) and thus is absorbed in a way that bypasses the portal venous system. Inversely, dextromethorphan, a cough suppressor, is best taken orally because it needs to be metabolised by the liver into dextrorphan in order to be effective. This latter principle is that of most prodrugs. The use of suppositories is a way to bypass partially the portal vein: the upper 1/3 of the rectum is drained into the portal vein while the lower 2/3 are drained into the internal iliac vein that goes directly in the inferior vena cava (thus bypassing the liver).

text: Blood flow to the liver is unique in that it receives both oxygenated and (partially) deoxygenated blood. As a result, the partial gas pressure of oxygen (pO2) and perfusion pressure of portal blood are lower than in other organs of the body. Blood passes from branches of the portal vein through cavities between "plates" of hepatocytes called sinusoids. Blood also flows from branches of the hepatic artery and mixes in the sinusoids to supply the hepatocytes with oxygen. This mixture percolates through the sinusoids and collects in a central vein which drains into the hepatic vein. The hepatic vein subsequently drains into the inferior vena cava. The hepatic artery provides 30 to 40% of the oxygen to the liver, while only accounting for 25% of the total liver blood flow. The rest comes from the partially deoxygenated blood from the portal vein. The liver consumes about 20% of the total body oxygen when at rest. That is why the total liver blood flow is quite high, at about 1 litre a minute and up to two litres a minute. That is on average one fourth of the average cardiac output at rest.

text: Large veins that are considered part of the portal venous system are the:

text:
Hepatic portal vein
Splenic vein
Superior mesenteric vein
Inferior mesenteric vein

tag: ul

text: The superior mesenteric vein and the splenic vein come together to form the actual hepatic portal vein. The inferior mesenteric vein connects in the majority of people on the splenic vein, but in some people, it is known to connect on the portal vein or the superior mesenteric vein.

text: Roughly, the portal venous system corresponds to areas supplied by the celiac trunk, the superior mesenteric artery, and the inferior mesenteric artery.

text: Clinical relevance[edit]

text: Portal hypertension is a condition in which the blood pressure of the portal venous system is too high. It is often the result of cirrhosis of the liver.


document_title: List of best Major League Baseball season win-loss records

question_text: which team has the best record in major league baseball

text: Season records[edit]

text: The following teams finished the season with a .700 winning percentage or higher.

text: Since the season was expanded to 162 games in 1961, only two teams have managed a winning percentage greater than .700 (which requires 114 wins). These two are the 1998 New York Yankees and the 2001 Seattle Mariners.

text:
NL = National League
AL = American League
AA = American Association

text:
Season
Franchise
League
Wins
Losses
Pct.
Finish

1906
Chicago Cubs
NL
116
36
.763
Lost 1906 World Series

1902
Pittsburg Pirates
NL
103
36
.741
National League Champions

1886
Chicago White Stockings
NL
90
34
.726
Lost 1886 World Series

1909
Pittsburg Pirates
NL
110
42
.724
Won 1909 World Series

1954
Cleveland Indians
AL
111
43
.721
Lost 1954 World Series

2001
Seattle Mariners
AL
116
46
.716
Lost 2001 ALCS

1927
New York Yankees
AL
110
44
.714
Won 1927 World Series

1886
Detroit Wolverines
NL
87
36
.707
2nd place in National League

1897
Boston Beaneaters
NL
93
39
.705
Lost 1897 Temple Cup

1907
Chicago Cubs
NL
107
45
.704
Won 1907 World Series

1931
Philadelphia Athletics
AL
107
45
.704
Lost 1931 World Series

1998
New York Yankees
AL
114
48
.704
Won 1998 World Series

1887
St. Louis Browns
AA
95
40
.704
Lost 1887 World Series

1939
New York Yankees
AL
106
45
.702
Won 1939 World Series

tag: table

text: Other teams[edit]

text: Prior to 1886, teams played .700 ball or better over shorter schedules, where there is much less of the "evening out" effect of a lengthier season.

text: For example, the Chicago White Stockings won the National League's first pennant in 1876 with a 52-14 record (.788), and won the 1880 NL pennant with a 67-17 record (.798), which stands as the overall percentage record between the National or the American League. The White Stockings' 1880 record would project to a record of 129-33 under the modern schedule of 162 games, while Pythagorean expectation based on the White Stockings' results (538 runs scored, 317 runs allowed) and a 162-game schedule would translate to a record of 120-42.

text: The all-time best single season record belongs to the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who posted baseball's only perfect record at 67-0 (57-0 against National Association of Base Ball Players clubs) in 1869. Their record would stretch to 81-0 across the 1870 season before losing 8-7 in eleven innings to the Brooklyn Atlantics in Brooklyn on June 14.[1][2]

text: While this record is considered by many to be pre-MLB, the MLB (professional baseball's current official organization) has officially recognized this year as the beginning of professional baseball.[3]

text: The second-best record belongs to the 1875 Boston Red Stockings of the National Association, who finished with a record of 71-8 (.899), but the status of the National Association as a major league has long been disputed. The Red Stockings record would project to 146-16 under the modern schedule of 162 games, while Pythagorean expectation based on the Red Stockings results (831 runs scored, 343 runs allowed) and the modern 162-game schedule would translate to a record of 138-24.

text: The National Association folded at the end of 1875, and the Red Stockings, who had won the last four pennants, joined the National League for 1876, being renamed the Red Caps. The team went 39-31 for a fourth-place finish in 1876 before winning the 1877 and 1878 pennants with records of 42-18 and 41-19.

text: The third-best record belongs to the St. Louis Maroons of the 1884 Union Association, who finished with a record of 94-19 (.832), but the Union Association was quite lopsided in talent distribution (team owner Henry Lucas was also league president, an obvious conflict-of-interest situation which is now banned, and bought all the best available players for his franchise), generally disorganized (six teams played close to full schedules, another four teams folded and one relocated during the course of the season), and poorly scheduled. The Maroons' record would project to 135-27 under the modern schedule of 162 games, while Pythagorean expectation based on the Maroons' results (887 runs scored, 429 runs allowed) and a 162-game schedule would translate to a record of 131-31, but these results are of questionable merit.

text: The Union Association folded at the end of 1884, and the Maroons joined the National League for 1885. Playing against stiffer competition, they went 36-72 in 1885, and 43-79 in 1886, finishing in last and sixth in both seasons. In 1887, the Maroons relocated to Indianapolis and became the Indianapolis Hoosiers, playing three more seasons below .500 before folding.


document_title: Alphabet

question_text: where did the letters of the alphabet come from

text: Alphabet

text: Etymology

text: The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos). The Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta.[7] The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, which also meant house.

text: Sometimes, like in the alphabet song in English, the term "ABCs" is used instead of the word "alphabet" (Now I know my ABCs...). "Knowing one's ABCs", in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.

text: History

text: Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts

text: The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,[8] to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.[9]

text: In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time.[10] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[1] This script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.[11]

text: The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BC.[2] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the tenth century, two other forms can be distinguished, namely Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script.[12] The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Vowelless alphabets, which are not true alphabets, are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants are sometimes used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These letters have a dual function since they are also used as pure consonants.[13]

text: The Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script[1][2] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

text: The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean.[2] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. The vowels have independent letter forms separate from the consonants, therefore it was the first true alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent the vowels. The vowels are significant in the Greek language, and the syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols including 5 vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.

text: European alphabets

text: The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe.

text: Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.

text: Another notable script is Elder Futhark, which is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from AD 100 to the late Middle Ages. Its usage is mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

text: The Old Hungarian script is a contemporary writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century it once again became more and more popular.

text: The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include the Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

text: The longest European alphabet is the Latin-derived Slovak alphabet which has 46 letters.

text: Asian alphabets

text: Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts are in existence in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

text: Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia are descended from the Brahmi script, which is often believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.

text: In Korea, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great.[14] Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing[15] (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).

text: Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it is still widely used in Taiwan where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system—that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones.

text: European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).

text: Types

text:
Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts

Alphabetic

[L]ogographic
and [S]yllabic

Abjad
Abugida

  Latin
  Cyrillic
  Greek
  Armenian
  Georgian
  Hangul

  Hanzi [L]
  Kana [S] / Kanji [L]

  Arabic
  Hebrew

  North Indic
  South Indic
  Ethiopic
  Thaana
  Canadian syllabic

text:
History of the alphabet[show]

Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE

Hieratic 32 c. BCE

Demotic 7 c. BCE

Meroitic 3 c. BCE

Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE

Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE

Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE

Phoenician 12 c. BCE

Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE

Samaritan 6 c. BCE

Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE

Tifinagh

Paleohispanic (semi-syllabic) 7 c. BCE
Aramaic 8 c. BCE

Kharoṣṭhī 4 c. BCE
Brāhmī 4 c. BCE

Brahmic family (see)

E.g. Tibetan 7 c. CE
Devanagari 13 c. CE

Canadian syllabics 1840

Hebrew 3 c. BCE
Pahlavi 3 c. BCE

Avestan 4 c. CE

Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
Syriac 2 c. BCE

Nabataean 2 c. BCE

Arabic 4 c. CE

N'Ko 1949 CE

Sogdian 2 c. BCE

Orkhon (old Turkic) 6 c. CE

Old Hungarian c. 650 CE

Old Uyghur

Mongolian 1204 CE

Mandaic 2 c. CE

Greek 8 c. BCE

Etruscan 8 c. BCE

Latin 7 c. BCE

Cherokee (syllabary; letter forms only) c. 1820 CE

Runic 2 c. CE
Ogham (origin uncertain) 4 c. CE

Coptic 3 c. CE
Gothic 3 c. CE
Armenian 405 CE
Georgian (origin uncertain) c. 430 CE
Glagolitic 862 CE
Cyrillic c. 940 CE

Old Permic 1372 CE

Hangul 1443 (probably influenced by Tibetan)
Thaana 18 c. CE (derived from Brahmi numerals)

v
t
e

text: The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.[16] The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic).

text: Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts; true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas are used to write Tigrinya, Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida rather than a syllabary as their name would imply, since each glyph stands for a consonant that is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. (In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination would be represented by a separate glyph.)

text: All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is basically an abjad, but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/. (These are the only time vowels are indicated.) Cyrillic is basically a true alphabet, but has syllabic letters for /ja, je, ju/ (я, е, ю); Coptic has a letter for /ti/. Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.

text: The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which is normally an abjad. However, in Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and full letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with mandatory vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but all vowel marks were written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a was not written, as in the Indic abugidas, one could argue that the linear arrangement made this a true alphabet. Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida (ironically, the original source of the term "abugida") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic. (See below.)

text: Thus the primary classification of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages, further classification can be based on their treatment of tone, though names do not yet exist to distinguish the various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Such scripts are to tone what abjads are to vowels. Most commonly, tones are indicated with diacritics, the way vowels are treated in abugidas. This is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, tone is determined primarily by the choice of consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script, an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics, but the placement of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang. For most of these scripts, regardless of whether letters or diacritics are used, the most common tone is not marked, just as the most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas; in Zhuyin not only is one of the tones unmarked, but there is a diacritic to indicate lack of tone, like the virama of Indic.

text: The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole—that is, they had become logograms as in Egyptian Demotic.

text: The largest segmental script is probably an abugida, Devanagari. When written in Devanagari, Vedic Sanskrit has an alphabet of 53 letters, including the visarga mark for final aspiration and special letters for kš and jñ, though one of the letters is theoretical and not actually used. The Hindi alphabet must represent both Sanskrit and modern vocabulary, and so has been expanded to 58 with the khutma letters (letters with a dot added) to represent sounds from Persian and English. Thai has a total of 59 symbols, consisting of 44 consonants, 13 vowels and 2 syllabics, not including 4 diacritics for tone marks and one for vowel length.

text: The largest known abjad is Sindhi, with 51 letters. The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz (for Cyrillic), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak (for the Latin script), with 46. However, these scripts either count di- and tri-graphs as separate letters, as Spanish did with ch and ll until recently, or uses diacritics like Slovak č.

text: The Georgian alphabet (Georgian: ანბანი Anbani) is alphabetical writing system. It is the largest true alphabet where each letter is graphically independent with 33 letters.[citation needed] Original Georgian alphabet had 38 letters but 5 letters were removed in 19th century by Ilia Chavchavadze. The Georgian alphabet is much closer to Greek than the other Caucasian alphabets. The numeric value runs parallel to the Greek one, the consonants without a Greek equivalent are organized at the end of the alphabet. Origins of the alphabet are still unknown, some Armenian and Western scholars believe it was created by Mesrop Mashtots (Armenian: Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց Mesrop Maštoc')also known as Mesrob the Vartabed,who was an early medieval Armenian linguist, theologian, statesman and hymnologist, best known for inventing the Armenian alphabet c. 405 AD,[17][18] other Georgian[19] and Western,[20] scholars are against this theory.

text: Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs, and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

text: The Armenian alphabet (Armenian: Հայոց գրեր Hayots grer or Հայոց այբուբեն Hayots aybuben) is a graphically unique alphabetical writing system that has been used to write the Armenian language. It was introduced by Mesrob Mashdots around 405 AD, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and originally contained 36 letters. Two more letters, օ (o) and ֆ (f), were added in the Middle Ages. During the 1920s orthography reform, a new letter և (capital ԵՎ) was added, which was a ligature before ե+ւ, while the letter Ւ ւ was discarded and reintroduced as part of a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before).

text: The Armenian word for "alphabet" is այբուբեն aybuben (Armenian pronunciation: [ɑjbubɛn]), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet Ա այբ ayb and Բ բեն ben. The Armenian script's directionality is horizontal left-to-right, like the Latin and Greek alphabets.[21]

text: Alphabetical order

text: Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called alphabetical order.

text: The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z), which is derived from the Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order,[22] is well established, although languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French é, à, and ô) and of certain combinations of letters (multigraphs). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for the purposes of collation. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from the sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, but in 1994 the Real Academia Española changed the collating order so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci, and in 2010 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed it so they were no longer letters at all.[23][24]

text: In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme /ʃ/) are inserted between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after initial sz, as though it were a single letter—in contrast to several languages such as Albanian, in which dh-, ë-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh- and zh- (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with umlaut are collated ignoring the umlaut—contrary to Turkish that adopted the graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek, would come after tuz, in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory where umlauts are sorted like ä = ae since names as Jäger appear also with the spelling Jaeger, and are not distinguished in the spoken language.

text: The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ—ø—å, whereas the Swedish and Finnish ones conventionally put å—ä—ö at the end.

text: It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic.[25] Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.

text: Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which was later simplified. Arabic uses its own sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order for numbering.

text: The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.

text: Names of letters

text: The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound (acrophony), continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.

text: The names were abandoned in Latin, which instead referred to the letters by adding a vowel (usually e) before or after the consonant; the two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan, and were known as Y Graeca "Greek Y" (pronounced I Graeca "Greek I") and zeta (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term zed for Z in all forms of English other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W ("double V" in French), the English name for Y, and American zee for Z. Comparing names in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift: A, B, C and D are pronounced /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they are /a, be, se, de/. The French names (from which the English names are derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels from before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N and S (/ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/) remain the same in both languages, because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift.

text: In Cyrillic originally the letters were given names based on Slavic words; this was later abandoned as well in favor of a system similar to that used in Latin.

text: Orthography and pronunciation

text: When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the spelling of words in that language. In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes (significant sounds) of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography there would be a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes, so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However this ideal is not usually achieved in practice; some languages (such as Spanish and Finnish) come close to it, while others (such as English) deviate from it to a much larger degree.

text: The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

text: Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:

text:
A language may represent a given phoneme by a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme [tʃ] and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. Kabardian also uses a tetragraph for one of its phonemes, namely "кхъу". Two letters representing one sound occur in several instances in Hungarian as well (where, for instance, cs stands for [tʃ], sz for [s], zs for [ʒ], dzs for [dʒ]).
A language may represent the same phoneme with two or more different letters or combinations of letters. An example is modern Greek which may write the phoneme [i] in six different ways: ⟨ι⟩, ⟨η⟩, ⟨υ⟩, ⟨ει⟩, ⟨οι⟩, and ⟨υι⟩ (though the last is rare).
A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for "beer" [เบียร์] retains a letter for the final consonant "r" present in the English word it was borrowed from, but silences it.
Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence (sandhi).
Different dialects of a language may use different phonemes for the same word.
A language may use different sets of symbols or different rules for distinct sets of vocabulary items, such as the Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries, or the various rules in English for spelling words from Latin and Greek, or the original Germanic vocabulary.

text: National languages sometimes elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with an international language with wide variations in its dialects, such as English, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

text: Some national languages like Finnish, Turkish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, these national languages lack a word corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out)', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.

text: At the other extreme are languages such as English, where the pronunciations of many words simply have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling in a consistent way. For English, this is partly because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography was established, and because English has acquired a large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. Even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful most of the time; rules to predict spelling from the pronunciation have a higher failure rate.

text: Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet.

text: The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet.


document_title: Renaming of cities in India

question_text: when was the name changed from bombay to mumbai

text: Renaming of cities in India

text: Renaming in local languages[edit]

text: In the post-colonial era, several Indian states' names were changed. Some of these changes coincided with the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, a major reform of the boundaries of India's states and territories that organised them along linguistic lines. At this time, for example, Travancore-Cochin was renamed Kerala. Later state name changes include the reorganisation of Madhya Bharat into Madhya Pradesh in 1959;[2] and the renamings of the Madras State to Tamil Nadu in 1969, of the Mysore State to Karnataka in 1973, and of Uttaranchal to Uttarakhand in 2007.

text: Name changes have varied with respect to the levels of language at which they have been applied, and also accepted. Some of these local name changes were changes made in all languages: the immediate local name, and also all India's other languages. An example of this is the renaming of predominantly Hindi-speaking Uttaranchal (Hindi: उत्तराञ्चल) to a new local Hindi name (Hindi: उत्तराखण्ड Uttarakhand). Other changes were only changes in some of the indigenous languages. For example, the renaming of the Madras Presidency to Madras State in 1947 and then Tamil Nadu in 1969 required non-Tamil speakers to change from an approximation of the British name (Tamil: மதராஸ் மாகாணம் Madras Presidency, then Madras State Tamil: மதராஸ் மாநிலம்) to a native Tamil name (Tamil: தமிழ்நாடு Tamil Nadu, "Tamil land").

text: In general, changes to the local names of cities in the indigenous languages are less common. However, a change in English may sometimes also be a reflection of changes in other Indian languages other than the specific local one. For example, the change of Madras (Tamil: மதராஸ் Madras) to Chennai (Tamil: சென்னை Chennai) was reflected in many of India's languages, and incidentally in English, while the Tamil endonym had always been Chennai and remained unaffected by the change.

text: Renaming in English[edit]

text: Change in official English spelling[edit]

text: The renaming of cities is often specifically from English to Indian English in connection with that dialect's internal reforms. In other words, the city itself is not actually renamed in the local language, and the local name (or endonym) in the indigenous languages of India does not change, but the official spelling in Indian English is amended. An example is the change from English "Calcutta" to English "Kolkata" – the local Bengali name (কলকাতা Kôlkata) did not change. Such changes in English spelling may be in order to better reflect a more accurate phonetic transliteration of the local name, or may be for other reasons. In the early years after Indian independence, many name changes were effected in northern India for English spellings of Hindi place names that had simply been romanised inconsistently by the British administration – such as the British spelling "Jubbulpore," renamed "Jabalpur" (जबलपुर) among the first changes in 1947. These changes did not generate significant controversy. More recent and high-profile changes – including renaming such major cities as Calcutta to Kolkata – have generated greater controversy.[3] Since independence, such changes have typically been enacted officially by legislation at local or national Indian government level, and may or may not then be adopted by the Indian media, particularly the influential Indian press. In the case of smaller towns and districts which were less notable outside and inside India, and where a well known English name (or exonym) could not be said to exist, older spellings used under British India may not have had any specific legislation other than changes in practice on the romanisation of indigenous Indian language names.

text: Realignment of the official Indian English name to an alternative local name[edit]

text: Aside from changes to the official English spellings of local names there have also been renaming proposals to realign the official name, hence the English name with an alternative local name. Ethnically sensitive examples include the proposals by the Bharatiya Janata Party (1990, 2001) to rename Ahmedabad to Karnavati[4] and Allahabad to Prayag. These two proposals are changes from the Muslim (or Mughal) name to a Hindu native name. These can be represented as a change from Urdu language to Hindi language, but since the two languages are variants of Hindustani the proposal is effectively a cultural and ethno-religious proposal rather than a linguistic one.[5]

text: Adoption of name changes in India and overseas[edit]

text: Official name changes naturally take place quickly if not immediately in official government sources.[6] Adoption may be slower among the media in India and abroad, and among Indian authors.[7][8][9]

text: Important examples[edit]

text: States[edit]

text:
Travancore-Cochin → Kerala (1 November 1956).
Madhya Bharat → Madhya Pradesh (1 November 1959)
Madras State → Tamil Nadu (14 January 1969)
Mysore State → Karnataka (1 November 1973)
Uttaranchal → Uttarakhand (1 January 2007)
Orissa → Odisha (4 November 2011)

text: Cities[edit]

text: Notable city names that were officially changed by legislation after independence include:

text:
Jabalpur (Hindi: जबलपुर), from Jubbulpore, respelled in 1947
Jajmau (Hindi: जाजमऊ), from Jajesmow, respelled in 1948 [10]
Kanpur (Hindi: कानपुर), from Cawnpore, respelled in 1948
Vadodara (Gujarati: વડોદરા), from Baroda, respelled in 1974
Thiruvananthapuram (Malayalam: തിരുവനന്തപുരം), from Trivandrum, respelled in 1991
Mumbai (Marathi: मुंबई), from Bombay, renamed in 1995 [11]
Kochi (Malayalam: കൊച്ചി), from Cochin, respelled in 1996
Chennai (Tamil: சென்னை), from Madras, renamed in 1996
Kolkata (Bengali: কলকাতা), from Calcutta, respelled in 2001
Kadapa (Telugu: కడప), from Cuddapah, respelled in 2005
Puducherry (Tamil: புதுச்சேரி), from Pondicherry, respelled in 2006
Bengaluru (Kannada: ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು), from Bangalore, respelled in 2007 [12]
Belagavi from Belgaum in 2014 [13][14]
Tumakuru from Tumkur in 2014
Hubballi from Hubli in 2014
Shivamogga from Shimoga in 2014
Hosapete from Hospet in 2014
Mysuru from Mysore in 2014
Kalaburagi from Gulbarga in 2014
Chikkamagaluru from Chikmagalur
Vijapura from Bijapur in 2014
Ballari from Bellary in 2014
Mangaluru from Mangalore in 2014
Rajahmahendravaram from Rajahmundry in 2015
Gurugram from Gurgaon in 2016

text: For others, by state order, see list of renamed Indian cities and states.

text:
Alappuzha, from Alleppey
Guwahati (Assamese: গুৱাহাটী), from Gauhati
Indore, from Indhur
Kanchipuram from Kāñci-pura And Conjevaram
Kannur, from Cannanore
Kollam, from Quilon
Koyilandy, from Quilandi
Kozhikode, from Calicut
Kumbakonam from ancient name Kudanthai
Mayiladuthurai from Mayavaram ancient name Mayuram
Narmada, from Nerbudda
Nagaon (Assamese: নগাওঁ), from Nowgong
Palakkad, from Palghat
Panaji, from Panjim
Pune, from Poona
Ramanathapuram, from Ramnad
Sagar, from Saugor
Shimla, from Simla
Thalassery, from Tellicherry
Thanjavur, from ancient name Tanjore
Thoothukudi, from Tuticorin
Thrissur, from Trichur
Tindivanam, from Tinthirivanam
Tiruchirapalli, from Trichinopoly and its short form Trichy
Tirunelveli, from Tinnevelly
Tiruvallikeni, from Triplicane
Udhagamandalam, from Ootacamund and its short form Ooty
Viluppuram, from Vizhupparaiyar And Vizhimaa Nagaram
Varanasi, from Benares
Vatakara, from Badagara
Virudhachalam, from Vriddhachalam ancient name Thirumudhukundram
Vijayawada, from Bejawada
Visakhapatnam, from Waltair, and before that Vizagapatnam and its short form Vizag

text: Town names that derive from ancient names:

text:
Mandi, derived from Mandav Nagar [15]
Nellore, in ancient times Simhapuri [16]

text: Proposed changes[edit]

text: Several other changes have been proposed for states and towns.

text: States and Union territories[edit]

text:
Goa to Govapuri [17]
Kerala to Keralam
Nagaland to Naganchi [18]
West Bengal to Bengal

text: Towns[edit]

text:
Allahabad to Prayagraj[19]
Aurangabad to Sambhajinagar
Bhopal to Bhojpal [20]
Hyderabad to Bhagyanagar
Mahabubabad to Manukota
Mahbubnagar to Palamuru

text: Need for unification of spelling[edit]

text: India has various local languages. Even (Romanised) English spellings in long and wide use often vary depending upon which government department or agency uses them. To the point, a few examples are Quilandy vs. Koyilandy, Canannore vs. Kannur, and Rangiya vs. Rangia. Different departments of the government may have used official spellings in use at the time, while locations associated with Indian railways mostly maintained British-era spellings. The confusion inherent in such variations has often resulted in serious consequences like people having two "different" addresses (theoretically designating the same place) in their official records leading to legal disputes, or one house having residents of different house addresses due to differing place names. Many people argue that such confusion can lead to indeterminate and/or unintended consequences [21]