Hi,

Maybe somebody here will have an idea about this problematic issue.

See this discussion:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116761

(Click "Show older changes" to see all the comments.)

Briefly, the name of the Central Kurdish language (code ckb) is currently shown as "کوردیی ناوەندی". If I understand correctly, this may be a correct translation of "Central Kurdish" into Central Kurdish, but at least some speakers don't like it. The people who edit the Wikipedia in question are asking for "کوردی", which is just "Kurdi".

It does appear as the autonym in CLDR,[1] but CLDR is not necessarily a reliable source.

The name in CLDR in some other languages is something like "Kurdi Sorani", and it's also mentioned in Ethnologue as one of the possible autonyms. Furthermore, some of the people who participate in the discussion at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116761 are not opposed to calling it "Kurdi Sorani", but others are loudly demanding only "کوردی".

My own consideration for being reluctant about calling it only "کوردی" is that there is another Wikipedia in a Kurdish language, with the code ku. (Arguably, it should be changed to kmr, but that's a topic for another discussion.) That language's name is written as "Kurdi". Both of these languages can be written in the Latin and in the Arabic alphabet, although ku is more commonly written in Latin and ckb is more commonly written in Arabic. Having two languages with the same name—albeit in a different script—may be confusing and misleading for a reader who needs to choose. That's why labeling ckb as "کوردی سۆرانی" ("Kurdi Sorani") looks like the safest option to me, but not everybody there agrees with this.

One of the most interesting comments[2] on the discussion about changing the name gives several examples of other websites, which use "کوردی" and "Kurdi" in the language selector, and says that the Latin-script name points to what would be "ku" in Wikipedia, and the Arabic-script name points to what would be "ckb". I don't know any Kurdish language, but I do know the Arabic alphabet, and the texts in these websites do seem different enough, and not just the same language in different alphabets. Furthermore, at least one of them tags the versions as ckb and ku using the HTML lang attribute. If this is indeed a practice on several other websites in these languages, then I _guess_ I'll be OK with doing it on Wikipedia as well, but I decided to try to run this by the Language committee first, just in case.

Does any of you have an opinion about this?

Thanks!

[1] http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/31/by_type/locale_display_names.languages__a-d_.html#50b99c1c6d99711a
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116761#3387578

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬