Deasbaireachd a' chleachdaiche:Gunmhoine/appendix

General points

We had this issue over on CLDR and Microsoft to some extent. The working guidelines we came up with for languages names are as follows:

1. if there's an established name, use it (Beurla, Gàidhlig, Gearmailtis...)
2. if there's no established name and the language name is commonly recognized in Scotland/W Europe, use a transliteration/translation (Afraganis, Frìsis...). Consider using "Cànan + place" as adding -ais often breaks letter to sound/phonological rules (Cànan nan Tàidh, Cànan Hawai'i...)
3. as an exception to 2 and in cases of names not commonly recognized, if the "English" form of the name is also the one used by the ethnicity itself, retain this form (e.g. Maori, Lakhota, !Xu...)
4. in all other cases, retain the "English" form (Tabasaran, Yi, Mohawk...)

There is no possible justification for spellings like Meascailearo or Tiùbhais. To begin with, they are almost always in great violation of Gaelic letter to sound and/or phonological rules. They are also usually incomprehensible to anyone but the person who made them up.

Ther's no need really to be holier than the pope languages like Gaelic. If German speakers are ok with calling Mescalero Mescalero, then there is no reason why Gaelic cannot also take such a common sense approach. With 6000 languages, it is not feasible to nativize them all. Akerbeltz (an deasbaireachd) 17:17, 21 dhen Ghearrain 2015 (UTC)

In general I thing these guidelines are quite sensible and I'd be happy to revert to Mescalero and leave e.g. Xhosa as it is. I have no problems with using exonyms, except that they can be rather unpronouncible. (The xh- is an aspirated lateral click e.g.) or worse: they can be in a different alphabet or script. The latter makes transliteration unavoidable.

I therefore have a bit of a problem with the case of cv "Chuvash" (Чăвашла, Căvašla; IPA: [tɕəʋaʂˈla]). The English name is a rather bad rendering of the name the speakers themselves give to their language, Tiabhais would come a lot closer to rendering the Cyrillic Чăвашла than Chuvash does. If Gàidhlig can render the exonym better than Beurla why should Gàidhlig be saddled with another bad English mispronunciation? Even Germans would balk at that and rightly so. Exonyms and (bad) English renderings thereof are not the same thing.

I am also not so happy with the "cànan .." story because languages should not be falsely linked to countries. empires or even regions. For one thing that gets you into political disputes over territory that are not opportunate for Uiclair. Idir. Also, languages are widely spoken across national boundaries even on different continents.

Gunmhoine (an deasbaireachd) 20:36, 22 dhen Ghearrain 2015 (UTC)