Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 August 10

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 10

Is this a reliable source?

They speak Meena language."Meena". -- Karsan Chanda (talk) 04:59, 10 August 2022 (UTC) Karsan Chanda (talk) 04:59, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

The place for questions about reliability is the Reliable sources noticeboard, not here. And in order to determnine reliability, we'd need publication information, not a link to a random PDF. It's by a Professor, apparenty, but who published it? Has it been edited by a reputable publisher? ColinFine (talk) 09:15, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

The paper is said to be published in the journal Bhashhiki, of which the author of the paper is the editor in chief, which is somewhat problematic. (The link also only gives the year of the paper, while the journal is quarterly, making it harder to verify, but whatever.) The only linguistics researcher with his name only appears in Google Scholar to have publications on ResearchGate, without journal information, though his other blog suggests he has more articles in non-English journals (but without listing detailed citation information). He doesn't claim to speak other Indian languages besides Hindi and Urdu (which seems unusual to me). I read the first paper of his on his blog, which is fine, and the first paper on Scholar/ResearchGate, which definitely needs a good editor and is very confusing in who its audience is supposed to be, but otherwise is uncontroversial.

So if he's one of only a very few researchers on Meena, can you trust him? I think it comes down to whether he makes particularly extraordinary claims in this or in his other research, and whether he is particularly suited to make new claims in this field of study specifically. In the former case, not that I can see. In the latter, his paper on Meena says he did a survey of Rajasthan languages previously, but he also doesn't claim to speak any Rajasthani-type languages (which may or may not be indicative of anything for an Indian linguist), so I don't know whether he can "intuit" whether Meena should be considered a distinct language, but his paper is not really about that issue anyway. In terms of whether he is actually doing these studies in a thorough, useful manner, I don't know -- I never studied that type of linguistics. But it would seem he's more or less reliable, but somebody who knows more about his field specifically should comment on whether the Meena description, or the Rajasthan survey, was actually properly/usefully done. SamuelRiv (talk) 12:17, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Similarity of exonyms and endonyms

As was probably noticed before, often the exonyms of various places sound similar or roughly similar to endonyms and vice versa, such as Danzig/Gdansk, Breslau/Wrocław, Petrozavodsk/Petroskoi, etc. One would expect that an invading enemy or a new owner would pick a totally different exonym of the occupied locality to erase the memory of past ownership, yet it doesn't look as such and such similarity is noticeable in several languages. Is the preference for historical similarity that common? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 14:58, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

". . . an invading enemy or a new owner would pick a totally different exonym of the occupied locality to erase the memory of past ownership"

Changes of territorial ownership or control are often not as hostile as you imply, especially in Europe in whose long history such changes are not uncommon. They can result from inheritances within interlinked royal families, for example. They often occur between immediate neighbors, whose languages are likely related and/or influenced by borrowings and sprachbund effects.

Moreover, Europe's tangled history is such that language speakers, not infrequently bi- or multi-lingual anyway, are not neatly separated, but greatly intermingled and with linguistic exclaves and inclaves. Language and naming is about communication – why make it intentionally more difficult and antagonise the populace deliberately? See Realpolitik. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.196.45.159 (talk) 15:16, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Furthermore, most European states were not nation states in the modern sense; that's an innovation of the late 19th and early 20th century, as governments found novel ways to consolidate their power over a populace that was increasingly becoming politically active against said governments. The kinds of ethnic cleansing we saw in the 20th century just didn't happen for most of history. Kings don't really care what language their subjects speak, so long as they work the fields and pay their taxes, it is unimportant to them. It was very common in the past for a city to keep essentially the same name as it changed hands, only changing its name to fit the peculiarities of the new language. The various names of Breslau all relate to "Vratislaus I, Duke of Bohemia", for whom the city is named, with variations to spelling and pronunciation to match the language of the state that ruled it at the time. The city was probably always multiethnic, as most cities are, and indeed probably were moreso in the past. Regardless of who controlled the city, there were significant populations of people in that city who spoke German, Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Romani, or any of a number of other languages, and they probably had their own unique way of saying and spelling the name of their city. There was no sense that the subjects would be required to learn the language of their King, or whatever. It just didn't happen until the politics of later eras sought to use ethnic uniformity as a way of eliminating threats to power. --Jayron32 15:31, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

I had ancestors that were citizens (or the equivalent) of the Duchy of Teschen, which existed until 1918. The territory has changed hands since then, and I've noticed that the name of Teschen switched to a transliteration of that name of who ever 'owned' the land locally. Teschen used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire, which really was a mixture of fiefdoms and duchies that were ruled by local lords in a loose confederation. Sorting out where my ancestors came from is a chore, so I just say Hapsburg Austrian, as they were Catholic. Note as well the modest mutual intelligibility between the many Slavic languages. As Jayron says, these cities were multiethnic, and this can be seen even in English with the many loan words that carried over from other languages. I grew up in a Jewish area, and although not Jewish, many of the Yiddish slang words common in the area were used by my family. Jip Orlando (talk) 16:57, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Also, as our article notes, many exonyms were created simply to make it easier to pronounce a foriegn name. London has never been invaded by the Finns, but they still call it Lontoo. Alansplodge (talk) 17:33, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

My guess is that when names are changed by "an invading enemy or a new owner," it's the endonym that they change because that's what they control. They can force the locals to call the place Istanbul or Myanmar or whatever, people elsewhere might prefer to hang on to the old name. Chuntuk (talk) 11:08, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Istanbul is an interesting story; and works the other way from what you think it does. The city remained officially Constantinople until the 1930s. However, the local people had been calling it "Istanbul" (a Turkish approximation of the Greek meaning roughly "to the City") for centuries, and it was a co-official name in Turkish since the 1730s. It was the popular name that was adopted by official sources later, not a novel name forced on the populace. --Jayron32 12:29, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

An example of a failed renaming is Puerto Argentino. Alansplodge (talk) 12:52, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Delving into that a little more, when the British discovered a group of islands in the south Atlantic in 1690 they called them the Falkland Islands. When the French populated them in 1764 they gave them the name Îles Malouines. To advance the fiction that they were actually discovered by Fernão de Magalhães, who wasn't in the area in 1519, and were thus owned by Spain (and later Argentina), Argentina identified them by the later name. 92.23.217.220 (talk) 13:39, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Usually areas that are annexed already have historically significant place names. For example the German name Danzig was in use since ancient times, so it was perfectly apt for nationalist reclamation. That didn't stop Nazis from implementing or planning a lot of brand new place names: Belgrade: Prinz-Eugenstadt, Berlin: Germania, Besançon: Bozen, Friedrichshain: Horst-Wessel-Stadt, Gdynia: Gotenhafen, Leningrad: Adolfsburg, Łódź: Litzmannstadt, Nesterow: Ebenrode, Rzeszów: Reichshof, Saarlouis: Saarlautern, Sevastopol: Theoderichshafen, Simferopol: Gotenburg, Szubin: Altburgund, Vršac: Hennemannstadt, Zamość: Himmlerstadt... --195.62.160.60 (talk) 07:24, 12 August 2022 (UTC)