Is there a rule as to when to keep the articles like San,Las, Los,La, Le (L'),
Les (yes, my dear Dutch, not forgetting Den), in names on separate katakanas?
Sometimes there is no choice, like in Las Vegas or San Diego, but, for e.g.
San Antonio, as far as I know you don't write サナントニオ but サンアントニオ.

Is LA just an exception as it has been known in Japan since so early times
that it came like that "by accident", and others were created later also
considering the structure of their names?
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2019-06-08T15:47:52.980
68746
2019-06-08T23:04:35.490
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question
katakana loanwords
Why ロサンゼルス　and not ロスアンゼルス　but ロスアラモス　and not ロサラモス？
There are considerable variations in how a 外来語 is transcribed. The wikipedia
page for LA says
`日本語では、外務省など政府機関においては「ロサンゼルス」としているが、「ロサンジェルス」「ロスアンゼルス」「ロスアンジェルス」などとも表現されている`.

There is a good article by NHK
[here](https://www.nhk.or.jp/politics/articles/feature/15156.html).
Apparently, the Japanese government has changed the official way of
transcribing country/city names this year. The article also talks about why
some styles were chosen over others, so generally a good article on this
topic.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcxvFm.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcxvFm.png).

In general: there is no standard way of coercing non-Japanese words into
katakana, and hence there are many different acceptable ways of doing it.
There are loose "styles" or common patterns, but they are by no way absolute
and the trend has also changed through time. As a result, many different
variants exist. Frequent words seem to find a dominant 表記 (like プーチン、ロサンゼルス）,
but even established style can change (e.g. メリケン -> アメリカン）. Generally, it is
advisable to stick to a single style within a single document (having
variations is called 表記揺れ and is considered poor style).
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2019-06-08T23:04:35.490
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answer