RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs' extlangs

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Sat Dec 6 00:21:38 CET 2008


On 5 Dec 2008, at 22:48, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> The Indians and the Chinese had been telling the world people what  
> to call their cities in English for quite a while now, and the world  
> is doing that (remember Peking, Bombay, and Madras?)

What? It's not Madras any more? I missed the memo.

> This has also been tried with language names (Sinhala vs Sinhalese)  
> or country names.

Singhalese. Myanmar. (Oh how I hate Myanmar. There is no -r. There has  
never been an -r. That's British Raj-ish for long a. Myanmaa it is, or  
Myanmah. Sigh.)

> The Persian Academy tried to do similar, and continues to. Of course  
> the
> Persian Academy only answered because the Australian government asked
> the Iranian government, and the Iranian government had no one else to
> turn to, other than the Academy. In other words, someone asked them,  
> and
> they told their preference. I don't think the Academicians believe  
> they
> can mandate something for non-Iranians.

Well said.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com



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