When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene?

Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to spell and more or less resembling how the name was pronounced in English. Thus we preferred Kirgistan to Kyrgyzstan or even Kyrgystan when describing the territory known as the Kyrgyz Republic (̐