Re: 2 many language tags for Norwegian

Frank Ellermann 2008-04-30 15.26:
> Leif Halvard Silli wrote:  
>
> > Let me rephrase the above: German speakers can be
> > lucky that, on the Web, their different flavours
> > of German, are tagged using geographical subtags.
>
> German speakers living in the region where frr is
> used will have to use frr +/- nds +/- da + de to
> get what they want (at some point in time, the last
> time I looked at frr sites they did not yet use the
> relatively new frr code)
>   

Not sure what you mean. A Standard Germaan speaker will have to set up 
the browser to ask for 'de'. If the user also want frr, then he must add 
'frr' to the browser, of course.

> Ditto for all other official or simply popular (tr)
> languages used in DE.
>   

Yes of course.

> > And they can all be tagged as de-something.
>
> No, you can't tag frr or nds as de-something.  You
>   

I agree. In my book Frisian isn't German.

> also won't try workarounds like fy-DE for frs, or
> fy-DK for frr as used in DE, or nl-DE for nds, not
> after the better tags were registered (fy-DE and
> nl-DE likely exist, and do NOT mean frs or nds).
>   

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

> > That standards is doing things opposite of the
> > way Apache works.
>
> I've not the faintest idea how language negotiation
> works with Apache, but if it cannot deal with more
> than one Accept-language it is broken.  The version
> mentioned by you (1.3) is rather old, isn't it ?
>   

I don't see much difference in Apache 2. I have studied - err - read the 
file where you set up language negotiation in Apache.

Anyway, as I just mentioned in another mail, one could taga file with 
all the frisian lanagua codes, if one want to be sure all Frisian users 
get it:

    index.frr.frs.fy.html


> > So are the standards developed in the free?
>
> You are free to subscribe to the LTRU list, and to
> participate, yes.  One of the folks replying to your
> posts is an active participant of that WG, another
> is a co-Chair, and I'm a former participant.  They
> will be delighted when you reopen the extlang issue
> (not).
>   

he he.

> > [old] sgn-DK ([new] Preferred-Value: dsl)
>
> Good idea, sgn-DK etc. was always shaky as there can
> be more than one sign language per region (= country).
>   

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

> > I suppose that sign languages have similarities.
>
> AFAIK no.  They might have the same signs for letters
> or phrases, but when you're down to letters it is in
> the relevant language like da.  You could also say
> that da, fo, is, nb, nn, no, and sv are "similar" and
> should be grouped under a Scandinavian "macrolanguage".
>   

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.

*Scandinavian: There are at least two definitions of Scandinavian. The 
strict sense I learned at school, is only Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

> > And the way I imagine progress, one should be able
> > use that in language tags as 'nor-nbo'.
>
> No progress, the "nor-" bit in nor-nbo is redundant,
> it makes no sense to put nor-nbo in billions of pages.
>   

You prefer that I write

    index.nb.no.html

in billon of pages instead?

> > gsw. Swiss German. Added in 2006, according to the
> > language subtag registry.
>
> > So why no use de-CH instead?
>
> Because de-CH is "high German" as used in the NZZ with
> some Swiss variations (no eszet, and some words such as
> "velo" or "zensurieren" not used elsewhere), while gsw
> is what they use when they talk.  BTW, gsw is also used
> outside of CH in FR and DE.
>   

Ok. Read about this in Wikipedia. I thought Swiss German was the 
official language in Switzerland. I now understand that what I had in 
mind was merely the Swiss spelling of high German ...

> >> Let alone "frr", "frs", "dsb", "lsb", etc. 
> > Those are not the German language.
>
> Minority languages used mostly in Germany.  Like se for
> Norway (don't beat me if that is not the relevant Sami
> language for Norway, I know nothing about Sami). 
I think it is relevant for 'se'.

> of course Norway is more Germanic than most other 

 > countries of the world, but maybe FO could beat
 > NO in this respect)

You know, in Scandinavia we greet each others with Hei!

> > (For the record, I have not ever proposed that 'no-SE'
> > should be valid.)
>
> ACK, you said you found it on a government site, right ?
>   

I did. On _the_ Goverment site. They might fix it though.

> > There are 3 Frisian languages. I would say the same:
> > They should have a common mother tag for "plain" Frisian.
>
> Unfortunately plain Frisian was lost hundreds of years ago.
>   

So was plain Norwegian.

> Like en is not more ang, and speakers of nds won't grok
> ang, they also won't grok en unless they learned it.  
>   

But that doesn't mean that they would be *ignoraant* about their 
language brothers and sisters. Language is also a symbol.

> It's unnecessary to find a Saxon macrolanguage for ang, en,
> nds, sxu, etc., or a Frisian macrolanguage, that's all old
> history, like a Scandinavian macrolanguage => forget it, it
>   

I disagree.

> won't help you to avoid to patch your Apache, or to avoid to
> find the place where Safari hides its configuration for more
> than one Accept-Language.

I don't say that it would solve all problems. But it would give a better 
tool for solving them.

>   I'd bet that it can do, you just
> havent't found it yet :-)  Netscape 3 vintage '96 supported
> more than one Accept-Language.
>   

The fact is that Firefox for OS X support those 99+ langauges. While 
Camino, which is also from Mozilla, works like Safari. (I have never 
liked to deep OS integration.)

> > I think 'de-nds' would have been smarter than only 'nds'.
>
> The original idea in RFC 1766 was a variation of "locales", 
> language + region.  And the Norwegian author of RFCs 1766
> + 3066 knew everything about the fine print of "no".  The
> concept was later extended, RFC 4646 is new, ISO 639-3 is
> very new, 4646bis is a draft, for ISO 639-6 I lost track...
>   

I know that there were a Norwegian author of those RFCs you mention. 
Those who wrote HTML 4 also knew it well, but did not solve everythign 
perfectly.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 14:01:01 UTC