Entity names (and associated sortnames) should be dropped in favour of aliases, and aliases get the possibility to be marked "native" (there would actually be three states: primary+native, primary, and non-primary), where the native primary alias stores what is now the entity name: The entity's "native" name (e.g. the artist name in the artist's native language).

The UI would display the native primary alias where it presently displays the entity name. The regular editing pages would allow editing native primary aliases, too, as they now do for names, though with locales added. (Preferably, they will allow editing other aliases from the same place: MBS-3108.)

This approach has the following advantages:

• We would have information about the locale and script of the entity name (asked for in MBS-7522/MBS-7807).
• The database schema would be simpler because all information about names would be in alias tables, instead of distributed over alias and entity tables.
• There can be more than one native name for an entity. E.g., a certain Belgian city has the French name Bruxelles and the Dutch name Brussel, both of which are equally official and "native". (The English name, on the other hand, Brussels, is not.)