naming a language

Paul Hopper hopper at cmu.edu
Wed Mar 18 17:09:08 UTC 2009


Mikael,

Good point. The insistence on endonyms often results in irritating errors. One advantage of changing Beijing back to Peking would be that we'd no longer have to hear news announcers saying the -j- as a voiced palatal fricative--apparently following the rule that you can never go wrong if you pronounce a foreign word as if it were French.

John Verhaar used to get very irritated at "Bahasa Indonesia" instead of "Indonesian", and once commented that it would be like always referring to German as "die deutsche Sprache". Even in linguistic works I've sometimes seen "Bahasa Indonesian"--as if Bahasa were the name of a region or something (cf. Canadian French).

- Paul Hopper



> I have often wondered why there is such a passion for endonyms among 
> linguists. It is one thing to avoid exonyms that the speakers might find 
> offensive, but apart from that, I have a hard time seeing the point in 
> using endonyms at any cost.
> 
> There are plenty of cases where there is a relatively established (in the
> linguistic literature) English term for a language, where later 
> publications have opted for a new name, and where I can see no other 
> effect than growing confusion. For people dealing with more than one or a
> few languages (such as typologists), this implies that you have to make an
> effort to know which language is which.
> 
> Having the same L1 as two of the previous posters, I would certainly not 
> see any benefit in the linguistic community adopting ”svenska” for my 
> language, rather than the more usual ”Swedish”. That would simply strike 
> me as ridiculous, and indeed, no linguists use the endonym when writing in
> English. Yet, I somehow suspect that if the language in question were 
> spoken primarily in a third world country, some linguists would have 
> preferred that option.
> 
> Should the aim be to somehow to avoid Eurocentricity (or perhaps rather 
> ”national-languages-of-the-first-world”-centricity”), isn’t it Eurocentric
> in itself to use one naming strategy for these languages, and restrict
> another to everything else?
> 
> Even if one term is used more than another in the already existing 
> literature, there may be reasons to choose another one. What the speakers
> themselves call their language, however, is not a strong reason to do so,
> in my view. Unless, of course, you happen to be writing in that particular
> language.
> 
> In a way, this can be compared to toponymical changes. There is a point in
> using Harare or Volgograd instead of Salisbury or Stalingrad, since the
> older names are, if nothing else, reminders of former régimes presumably
> not supported by the people who inhabit these cities today. But need we
> say Beijing and Guangzhou for what used to be been Peking and Canton? If
> so, must we start saying “the United Arab Emirates in Arabic”? (And should
> it be standard Arabic or the colloquial?).
> 
> 
> Mikael Parkvall
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213



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