Stop requiring endonyms (Was: RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs'extlangs/// Better use autonyms

[Lang Gérard]

0-In my opinion, when studying about identification and denomination concerning languages, the better solution is to use "autonyms"(i.e.:the name given to the considered language by this language itself), that certainly are a kind of endonym.
 And so, I consider that ISO 639-4, that is to give the general methodology to build and choose Latin-alphabetic  chains of characters of fixed length (alpha-2 for ISO 639-2, alpha-3 for ISO 639-2,3 and 5), should use these autonyms along the lines of the following points 1 and 2.

1-If the considered language is a written language such that no valid script for this  language is written with a variant of the Latin alphabet,  then a romanization should be used to obtain a "written romanized autonym" that represents a very good basis for sure identification and denomination of the language, as well as a source for building a code element for the representation of the name of the considered language, or a tag to represent this language. 
2-In the case where the considered language is not a written language, we have to use a "spoken autonym" and a phonetization using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) should be done to get a representation, to eventually further simplify by "romanization", as a good basis for identification and source for building a code element for the representation of the name of the considered language, or a tag to represent this language.

3-In the specific case of Persian/Farsi:
*ISO 639 (1988) gives the alpha-2 code element "fa" to represent the language name whose english version is "Persian", the french version is "perse" and the "original version" is "Farsi" that certainly is a romanization of the autonym. 
*ISO 639-1 (2002) gives the alpha-2 code element "fa" to represent the language name whose english versions are "Farsi, Persian", the frencjh versions are "farsi, perse" and the indigenous (unique) version is "fârsy", that is clearly another roma,nization of the same autonym.
*ISO 639-2 (1998) gives the alpha-3/B code element "per" and the alpha-3/T code element "fas" (recommanded) to represent the language name whose english version is
"Persian" and the french version is "perse".
*ISO 6639-3 (2006) gives the alpha-3 code element "fas", considered as identical to ISO 639-2/T  (and equivelent to the ISO 639-2 "fa" and to the ISO 639-2/B "per"), to represent the macro-language name whose english version is "Persian", that includes the language names whose english version is "dari", coded as "prs", and whose english version is "Western farsi", coded as "pes".
 Moreover, ISO 639-3 is also representing the language names whose english version is "Southwestern Fars", coded as "fay", and whose english version is "Northwestern Fars", coded as "faz". 

Cordialement.
Gérard LANG

-----Message d'origine-----
De : ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] De la part de John Cowan
Envoyé : lundi 8 décembre 2008 16:51
À : Stephane Bortzmeyer
Cc : ietf-languages at iana.org
Objet : Re: Stop requiring endonyms (Was: RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs'extlangs

Stephane Bortzmeyer scripsit:

> I regard this trend (requiring endonyms) as a quite stupid one.  Will 
> the british ask us to always write "London" instead of the exonym we 
> use ("Londres")? Will they send troops if we do not comply? If so, we 
> will ask the italians to stop calling our capital "Parigi" (the 
> endonym is Paris).

Arguably the English name "Paris" is an endonym as well; in Middle English and Old French, the name was unsurprisingly identical, but sound-changes in both English and French have altered the pronunciation of the "a", the "r", the "i" (in English only), and the "s" (in French only), while leaving the orthography unchanged.

Similarly, I suppose that the many U.S. placenames of French origin are pronounced as French by francophones, even though French is only minimally an endogenous language of the U.S. (parts of northern New England and Louisiana).

In New York's Chinatown, street signs are bilingual in English and Chinese, but who's to say which is the exonym and which the endonym in that case?

> Worse, and more on-topic for this list, will the english-speaking 
> people require that we call their language "english" while we always 
> used "anglais"?

The vast majority of all names are and must be endonyms.  There are exonyms for Warsawa (Warsaw, Varsovie, Warschau), but none for Zelazowa Wola, even though it was the birthplace of Chopin (whose name was itself something of an exonym).

When we deal with names across scripts, however, as in the Chinese and Indian cases, we are always dealing with exonyms, and then there is no particular advantage to having multiple exonyms, particularly in writing.  International postal addresses may be written in Latin script or the script of the destination (save for the country name, which must appear in the language of the source), and here having more than one way to write "Beijing" is nothing but a nuisance.

> To me, "persan" (the french word) is an exonym, like "german"
> ("deutsch") or "mandarin" (don't know how to write the endonym). 

Mandarin has no universal endonym; it is Putonghua 'common language'
in the People's Republic, Baihua 'official language' in Taiwan.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.  --John Donne _______________________________________________
Ietf-languages mailing list
Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages