Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

223 LANGUAGE FILE
the initial aspirated lateral click in the name of the language Xhosa. Where this
field has been left blank, no information was discovered, and while the pronunciation
may or may not be perfectly transparent from the orthography it
seemed safer to err on the side of caution. Occasionally alternative pronunciations
have been offered, though there are rather more alternatives differing
only in stress than have been listed.
Autonym
In many cases the language is known by the name the speakers of the language
themselves use, but in other instances the English name may derive from a
name originally given by a third party. It is often very difficult to find reliable
information about autonyms, and this space is accordingly left blank far more
often than would be desirable. In many cases where it is filled in, a phonetic
rendition is provided rather than an orthographic one (sometimes for obvious
reasons, sometimes because that was what was available in sources).
Language family
Language families are remarkably controversial. Not only is it often in doubt
what is related to what, the precise membership of several sub-branches of the
major families is also often in doubt. In principle, an attempt was made to
provide a two-term guide to language families, corresponding to names such as
Indo-European and Germanic for English. In practice this is difficult because
sources written at different periods will reflect the scholarship of their time and
may use different labels for the same families, and because it is often difficult to
judge what the most useful family label is likely to be. Although some attempt
has been made to standardise some of the nomenclature, there may still be
inconsistencies (or even errors seen from the position of recent scholarship).
Place spoken
The place or places where the language is spoken is or are usually given in terms
of country names, but sometimes with the names of states or provinces (in
which case the country is given in parenthesis after the name of the state or
province). Pockets of migrants who carry their language to a new country have
usually been ignored.
Number of speakers
As was noted above, the number of speakers of any language is changing
rapidly, and the numbers given in different sources often diverge by 100 per