Consistency in naming (was Re: creating words (was Re: "Language Creation" in your conlang))

Andreas Johansson wrote:
>I can still, BTW, not decide whether I ought to refer to these with their
>native terms (like above), or with the Tairezazh terms; Steianzh, Telenzh and
>Tsárizh. I guess the former makes the more sense, but I tend to think of them
>under the Tairezazh names, for the perfectly bad reason that I invented them
>first, and figured out the native terms only later. Perhaps I should simply
>anglicize; Steienean, Telenian and Searikhan? Then I, for consistency's sake,
>ought to speak of Tairezazh as Tairezan too.
You've probably noticed that I have some problems with this, too.  I seem
to call the Tovláugad by their Trehelish name, Cwendaso, as often as
not.  The original reason for this was that the Trehelish were my first
conculture, and everything was more or less from their point of
view.  Until recently, I didn't even know what the Cwendaso called
themselves.  Now that I know that they call themselves Tovláugad, I still
use Cwendaso a lot, for a couple of reasons.  One of them is simply force
of habit.  Another is that it is much easier to type, since Trehelish
doesn't have any accented characters, and Cwendaso will have an accented
character in any word of two or more syllables.  Yet another reason is
grammatical; the Trehelish word "Cwendaso" can refer to one person, many
people, the people as a whole, or the language.  If I'm using the native
word, one of them is a Tovláug, I don't have the plural ending, a whole lot
of them or the people as a whole is Tovláugad, and the language is Índumom
Tovlaugadóis.  "Cwendaso" is much more all-purpose.

The Nidirino get called Nidirino, because I haven't the foggiest notion
what they call themselves.  They are the least developed of my three main
concultures.

Now the dumb thing is that I always say Trehelish, instead of the native
Trehelo, which could refer to (probably) one person, many people, the
people as a whole, or their language.  It would be a nice shorthand to use
the native term, but I am just not in the habit of doing it.  I do often
say "a Trehel" instead of "a Trehelish person," but I also give that in an
English plural, "Trehels," which is completely incorrect and ought to be
"Trehelin" in the plural (unless this word is of the other gender and takes
a different plural ending.)  Trehel, by the way, means "emmigrant."  I am
also on debatable turf calling a single one a "Trehel."  It is quite
possible that the only acceptable native for is "Trehelo."

So I'm not a great one for consistency.

Isidora

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