ON LANGUAGE NAMES /// RE: Results of Duplicate Busters Survey #2
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Sat Sep 6 05:29:24 CEST 2008
John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:
> Unfortunately, there is no particular reason why indigenous names
> should be unique, and we know that they are not. The indigenous name
> used by speakers of the Ainu language of Japan is (in romanization)
> "Ainu"; the indigenous name used by an unrelated language of China is
> likewise "Ainu". The English or French names are usually ambiguous
> *because* the indigenous names are.
Indeed, as we progress from more widely known to less widely known
languages -- that is, from ISO 639-1 to 639-2 to 639-3 -- we find
increasingly that the indigenous names are the only ones that exist.
Many languages have their own names for "French" or "German," but how
many languages have their own names for "Safwa" or "Donno So Dogon"?
The disambiguation problems have already been worked out for most
languages whose English and French names are different from the
indigenous names.
--
Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14
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