- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:33:02 +0900
- To: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>, Tex Texin <tex@i18nguy.com>
- Cc: Jon Hanna <jon@hackcraft.net>, www-international@w3.org, ietf-languages@alvestrand.no
At 22:33 04/12/13, John Cowan wrote: >I have such a list, have had it for years, and have never been able >to get anyone to review it. Specifically it is a list of xx-yy and >xxx-yy combinations that reflect the Ethnologue's information on >"national and official" languages of particular countries. > >I have excluded languages that are only national/official in a single >country: thus Swedish is on the list (it is official in both Sweden >and Finland, and in fact takes sharply divergent forms in the two >countries), but Danish is not (official only in Denmark). I think whether a language is official or not in a certain country is not really relevant to whether to use the country designation or not. Whether the forms in each of the countries are actually significantly divergent (e.g. different grammar, orthography, different vocabulary) is what's relevant. Thus just taking the Ethnologue as a base doesn't give the right result. Also, any list, when published, should avoid the impression that if it contains a two-part language code, that language always has to be used with a two-part code. For each language affected (e.g. en), there sure is a large number of examples where the difference doesn't matter, and in that case, using more than the language itself as a label would be wrong. Regards, Martin.
Received on Tuesday, 14 December 2004 01:33:12 UTC