The word Άγιος might variously appear as Hagiοs, Agios, Aghios, or Ayios, or simply be translated as "Holy" or "Saint" in English forms of Greek placenames.
[1] Traditional English renderings of Greek names originated from Roman systems established in antiquity.
Because English orthography has changed so much from the original Greek, modern scholarly transliteration now usually renders ⟨κ⟩ as ⟨k⟩ and the diphthongs ⟨αι, οι, ει, ου⟩ as ⟨ai, oi, ei, ou⟩.
Owing to the difficulties encountered in transliterating and transcribing both ancient and modern Greek into the Latin alphabet, a number of regulatory bodies have been established.
Note, however, that the ELOT, UN, and ISO formats for Modern Greek intend themselves as translingual and may be applied in any language using the Latin alphabet.
It also comprised a Type 1 (Greek: Τύπος 1, romanized: Typos 1) transliteration table, which was extensively modified in the second edition of the standard.
International versions of ELOT 743, with an English language standard document, were approved by the UN (V/19, 1987) and the British and American governments.
So the transcriptions of Modern Greek into Latin letters used by ELOT, UN and ISO are essentially equivalent, while there remain minor differences in how they approach reversible transliteration.
[3] In the table below, the special rules for vowel combinations (αι, αυ, ει, ευ, ηυ, οι, ου, ωυ) only apply when these letters function as digraphs.
Beta, for example, might appear as round Β or pointed throughout Greece but is also found in the forms (at Gortyn), and (Thera), (Argos), (Melos), (Corinth), (Megara and Byzantium), and even (Cyclades).
For the most part, such variants—as ϖ and for π, ϛ for στ, and ϗ for και—are just silently emended to their standard forms and transliterated accordingly.
[12][16] Romanization of names for official purposes (as with passports and identity cards) were required to use the ELOT system within Greece until 2011, when a legal decision permitted Greeks to use irregular forms[17] (such as "Demetrios" for Δημήτριος) provided that official identification and documents also list the standard forms (as, for example, "Demetrios OR Dimitrios").