Re: USAGE: (Mis)Naming a Language

On Wednesday 27 Oct 2004 20:43, David Peterson wrote:

<snip>

> So, my question: Has something similar happened to anyone
> else?   And, do you think I should change the name of the
> language?   Would you, in this situation?   Also, what if someone
> created a language with a name like Teonaht, not knowing
> that one already existed, and (with no disrespect to this
> imaginary person) was far better?
>
Yep.

When I decided to attempt a polysynthetic language last year, I decided to
locate it in the southwest corner of my conworld continent, which happens to
have a number of towns ending with the syllable "ga". So I called the
language Ga.

http://www.kalieda.org/planet/telik/index.html

A few months after the website went up, I got a strange email asking for
details of my new language, and how it related to other languages in West
Africa. A couple of minutes of Googling turned up the fact that there really
is a language spoken in Ghana which goes by a number of names, including
"Ga". Checking the weblogs, I was also registering 5-10 visits a month from
people searching the web for "ga language".

Oops!

Well, I decided that I didn't want to mislead people searching for a living
language, and I also decided that "Ga" wasn't a very good name for a
polysynthetic language (far too short and simple), so I changed the name of
the language to:

Gartskozl'il'zikmask

I still call it Ga - I claim that it's what foreigners call the language
because they can't pronounce the second syllable of the word - rtskoz

> -David
>
Rik