"William J Poser" <wjposer at ldc dot upenn dot edu> wrote:
Actually, Bengali is called "Bangla" in Bengali but "Bengali" has been and still is the usual English name, both in common usage and in sources such as the Ethnolog. There is no disrespect in the English name for a language or country not being the same as that used in that language or country, as one can see from the fact that the English name is almost always different from the self-designation. This is true of every other language with which I am familiar, which of course is to be expected since different languages have different sound systems. If you know Bengali, you will know that "English" is not called "English" in Bengali.
Well said. I would add that the English name for this language in both ISO 639-2 and 639-3 is "Bengali," the English Wikipedia calls it "Bengali," and Ethnologue calls it "Bengali" and lists "Bangla" only as an alternate name, along with "Banga-Bhasa" and "Bangala." The French name in ISO 639-2 is also "bengali."
If we are to require that the English name of a language be identical to the native name, then we have a lot of changes to make besides this one: français, Deutsch, español, nederlands, russkiy, nihongo, etc.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
