Re: telco this Friday

Dear all,

>
>
>     Other that that I wanted to clarify one issue regarding language
>     codes in the example.
>
>     I have seen that some people (John?) have started to use the ISO
>     639-2 codes (e.g. "ENG" for English, "SPA" for Spanish etc.).
>     I would propose we stick to the ISO 639-1 two-letter ISO 639-1
>     codes (e.g. "EN", "ES") etc. There is no particular reason for
>     this other than the fact that most people know these codes.
>
>     If the argument is recency and reusing the newest standard, then
>     we would have to go anyway for four letter codes according to ISO
>     639-6.
>
>
> In the open mulitlingual wordnet we use the three letter codes because 
> there are people working on languages which do not have two letter 
> codes, such as Abui (abz), Minangkabau (min) or Cantonese (yue).  Note 
> that some of these are large language communities, Minangkabauhas 
> around 6 million speakers. I think this is a strong argument for not 
> going back to the two letter codes.

I suspect that the three-letter codes in question are intended to be ISO 
639-3 (and not 639-2), the use of which is pretty much best practice in 
linguistics today (even if there is quite a bit of discussion about how 
well it reflects lingusitic descriptive practice and actual reality; 
see, e.g., <http://dlc.hypotheses.org/610>), because of coverage (not 
even all the languages of Europe are covered by 639-1, e.g. the two 
Sorbian languages) and because of granularity: The "language" level of 
ISO 639-3 (basically that of the Ethnologue) will not be included in 
639-6, so there won't be a way of saying "English", since 639-3 already 
provides one, but you will be able to say (or, rather, propose codes 
for), e.g., "Elizabethan English", "Modern Australian English", etc.

Best
Lars

-- 
«Null hull,» sa Harry    | – Bögga? sagði Erlendur. Er það orð? |
(Jo Nesbø: Kakerlakkene) | (Arnaldur Indriðason: Mýrin)         |
--
Se aikainen matohan nokitaan!
(Reijo Mäki: Uhkapelimerkki)
----
Lars Borin
Språkbanken • Centre for Language Technology
Institutionen för svenska språket
Göteborgs universitet
Box 200
SE-405 30 Göteborg
Sweden

office +46 (0)31 786 4544
mobile +46 (0)70 747 8386

<http://språkbanken.gu.se/personal/lars/>