Quote:
Originally Posted by madog222
The non-latin characters are for sounds that don't exist in European languages. It's not like romanizing East Asian languages.
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Yah, but here's the thing: if the sounds don't exist in European languages then people whose native tongue is one of those languages won't be able to produce them, at least not without training. It's exactly the same issue that Asian people have when trying to pronounce an "L" sound - it comes out as "R" because they don't have the "L" sound in their native language.
So my point is, if there's a desire in the native community to have their names more widely adopted, then the only way to make it happen in this community of non-native speakers is to produce some facsimile of the word that the rest of us can deal with - including writing it in a way that we can readily understand.
If that accommodation can't be made, then the native word will be fated to be ignored in favor of some other word that folks can deal with more easily. Surely that's not the goal, is it?