A translatewiki volunteer has asked to change the name of the Mon language (mnw): https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Support&oldid=12099815
The current name is ဘာသာ မန်. The volunteer is asking to remove the space, so that it would become ဘာသာမန်.
Ethnologue shows a name with a space, and Google has more results with a space than without. However, a Russian book about Mon morphology that I found online (Крылов Ю. Ю. Фонология и морфонология монского языка. — СПб.: Изд-во СПб. ун-та, 2009. — 228 с.) says that the language is written without spaces between words, so perhaps Ethnologue is wrong.
I'm inclined to make the change, but I'll do a few more checks.
If the change is made, it will probably require adding a pointer from the old name, to make finding just by the name "မန်" (Mon) possible in the ULS search box.
- check the history of the name in MediaWiki files: I tried digging into the history and I couldn't find the source for the space. It was first added before translatewiki's language configuration was managed in Gerrit. According to the comment, it was added by myself in 2012, but I don't remember what prompted me to do it. Actual translation into Mon began only in 2017.
- decide that the change is necessary. (I pinged the active translators into Mon on translatewiki and some active editors on the Mon Wikipedia. I received one response. Given the time passed, and that the original request came from a native speaker, this seems enough.)
- change in language-data (patch)
- update in jquery.uls (patch)
- update in ULS extension (patch)
- add an alias with the old name to ULS search index (patch)
- run the script to auto-update the ULS search index
- change in jquery.ime (patch)
- change in Names.php (patch)
- bonus: Document the renaming process in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Adding_and_removing_languages (in progress)
(please edit the task and add boxes if anything is missing)