Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Swaziland becomes Eswatini

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:33:54 -0700

Michael Everson wrote:

> Swaziland or eSwatini? King's new name faces legal challenge
  
According to the quoted article: "He asked that the court set aside the
decision as the product of the whim of the UK-educated monarch taken
without any public consultation, court papers showed on Friday. 'Every
citizen has a right to take part in the conduct of public affairs,
directly or through freely chosen representatives,' Maseko said in the
papers."

Um, he's a king. He gets to do things like change the name of his
country on a whim, and without asking his subjects. That's what absolute
monarchs do.

In any case, it was the ISO 3166 action, not the king's, that prompted
this change request.
  
> Are you sure it’s not eSwatini? That spelling structure is common in
> Bantu languages. (No, I didn’t go look it up.)

As I wrote, both ISO 3166 and apparently the government are using
"eSwatini" in Swati-language contexts, but "Eswatini" in
English-language contexts. It looked wrong to me too, but it's their
call really.
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 13:24:16 -0400

> country on a whim, and without asking his subjects. That's what absolute

What is more, this is not even like the switch from Central African Republic
to Central African Empire (since reverted).  All the king is doing is
telling people
to use the Swazi/siSwati name of the country in English as well.  This is
not
so different from switching from "Sandwich Islands" to "Hawaiian Islands".

> English-language contexts. It looked wrong to me too, but it's their

inDeed, but words like "iMac" do look terrible in English at the beginning
of
sentences in particular.

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        [email-masked]
        "Not to know The Smiths is not to know K.X.U."  --K.X.U.

---

From: Hugh Paterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:07:55 -0700

My name is not MacDonald, so I would't use that as the value for familyName
if I were to write a FOAF profile for myself. I did write a paper for ICPhS
on my iMac. Most students there were PhD candidates. Since publishing in
phonetics I have moved on to JavaScript, where in geoJSON I have learned to
write my data keys as camelCase, you know for convention following sake. My
wife is an Africanist (mostly Niger-Congo), and in the languages she works
with most often, there is a lot of prefix hyphenation. I figure this comes
from French where infinitive plus pronoun can be separated such as in
aide-moi. If any of you are going to TypeCon2018 in Portland, Oregon maybe
we could have a vis-à-vis, and discuss this issue. It seems that the issue
could be considered a word boundary issue rather than a capitalization
convention. That is, some languages don't require spaces between words, and
there are two distinct strategies for showing word separation without
spaces: camelCase and hyphenation; though in computer data structures we
also see snake_Case. In my professional writing I have never had an
objection to using an autonym including its normalized capitalization in
its orthography (especially when it is a Latin script).

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 10:24 AM, John Cowan <[email-masked]> wrote:

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