Re: 2 many language tags for Norwegian

Leif Halvard Silli scripsit:

> So sad. To refer to Western Frisian, one can use fy-DE, but for Northern 
> Frisian one must use a completely other pattern - frr.

Rightly Western Frisian is simply "fy"; "fy-NL" would be redundant, and
"fy-DE" would mean the variety of Western Frisian spoken in Germany, which
almost certainly does not exist.

> But why must the -DK only refer to Denmark? I take it to refer to the 
> "official" Danish flavour of signlanguage.

There is no one sign language -- sign languages are as alike or as different
as spoken languages.  English and American Sign Languages, for example, are
completely different, as mutually unintelligible as English and French.
As I posted earlier, though, French and American Sign Language have a common
origin, and some degree of mutual intelligibility may exist.

> According to Wikipedia, Signlangauges *can* be grouped in 
> languages/dialects close to each others. Japanese and Danish will not be 
> be close, then, I suppose. But the Scandinavian* signlanguages will be.

In fact yes.

> >Unfortunately plain Frisian was lost hundreds of years ago.
> 
> So was plain Norwegian.

Not really comparable.

-- 
That you can cover for the plentiful            John Cowan
and often gaping errors, misconstruals,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
and disinformation in your posts                cowan@ccil.org
through sheer volume -- that is another
misconception.  --Mike to Peter