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

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:31:09 -0700

Hugh Paterson wrote:

> 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).

The issue, at least for me, is NOT about being personally unfamiliar or
uncomfortable with the capitalization "eSwatini."

The issue, as I keep saying, is that both ISO 3166 and the government of
the country in question use the capitalization "Eswatini" in
English-language contexts.

Section 3.1.5 says that Description values are not "guaranteed to be in
any particular language." Nevertheless, most region names in the
Registry do happen to be the English names. We use "Germany," for
example, not "Deutschland" or "Allemagne" or "Njemačka" or "ドイツ".

So I am proposing the name as it appears in English-language contexts,
according to the authorities that seem to have a say in this.
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:45:51 -0700

I wrote:

> 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.

The "it" here might have caused some confusion.

I meant that initially, "Eswatini" looked wrong to me, because I know
the "e" is a prefix in Swati and would normally be lowercased, with the
attached stem word capitalized. But, if "Eswatini" is what ISO 3166/MA
and the government want to use, it's their call.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 09:09:31 -0700

Philip Newton wrote:

> To clarify: do you think that it's a good idea to put the name coming
> from the source standard first?
>
> Or do you think that it's a good idea that RFC 5646 does not have that
> rule for region and script subtags?

The former.