Talk:Malagasy

how do you say/write madagascar in malagasy

In Malagasy, write Madagasikara. —Stephen 22:41, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

RFC

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This entry now has a proper noun and two noun headers. I marked the edit doing this as patrolled, because I thought it would be easy to integrate the edit into what was already there- it wasn't.

The Malagasy language is either a single language with multiple dialects, or as many as 13 languages (a macrolanguage, perhaps?). Merona Merina, the language/dialect spoken in the capital, can be referred to as Malagasy, or the term can be applied collectively to all the languages/dialects as a whole. The Malagasy people can be referred to collectively as "(the) Malagasy", or individually as "Malagasies".

I remember we went through similar issues with Irish, though perhaps the way it was dealt with at Xhosa might be a better model. At any rate, I wasn't happy with the status quo, but I don't like multiple noun headers, either. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:33, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I've made some changes to the entry. Next to [[Irish]] and [[Xhosa]] I would add [[Great Russian]] as a possible model: someone came up with a good way of handling that that entry is a term for a "dialect" that's actually a language, which I've reversed in approaching "Malagasy" (term for "a language" that's actually several). - -sche (discuss) 03:50, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

out of interest, is the pronunciation /æsi/ or /æzi/, as it displays the first one, but I would instinctively use the second one. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:58, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

...and Wikipedia has [ˌmalaˈɡasʲ], which doesn't seem likely to be a widespread English pronunciation — perhaps that's the pronunciation used in Madagascar, or in Malagasy? - -sche (discuss) 22:40, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

French Malgache and English Malagasy are both representations of the same Malagasy word. If I understand it correctly, there are rules that reduce or elide vowels, depending on their position in the word, and their position relative to the stress. There also is palatalization that varies as well. The fact that French has ch rather than j for the palatalized variant indicates that the underlying form is unvoiced- so the /æsi/ form is more likely. I've heard people from Madagascar pronounce it that way, but they may have just been adopting an Americanized pronunciation to be understood better by non-Malagasy. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:49, 1 July 2012 (UTC)