Re: 2 many language tags for Norwegian

Frank Ellermann scripsit:

> No, you can't tag frr or nds as de-something.  You also won't try
> workarounds like fy-DE for frs, or fy-DK for frr as used in DE,

To be fair, it was only recently that 639/RA clarified that fy means
specificially West Frisian as opposed to a macrolanguage for all Frisian.

> or nl-DE for nds, 

/me chuckles at the notion that Low Saxon is "Dutch as spoken in Germany".

> (fy-DE and nl-DE likely exist, and do NOT mean frs or nds).

Ethnologue concedes that Dutch is spoken in Germany, but gives zero
details; no mention of West Frisian at all.  But I doubt there is a
sufficiently distinct variety of Dutch to merit the label nl-DE, any
more than there is de-BE.

> 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.

Sign languages do borrow some words in spelled-out form from co-located
spoken languages, but most signs are not derived from any spoken
languages.  (There are also pidgin forms of sign languages that map a
sign to each word of a spoken language, making it possible to speak and
sign at the same time, but this is not the natural use of sign language.)

In addition, the relationships of sign languages are independent of
spoken languages.  American Sign Language is a descendant of French Sign
Language, as is Quebec Sign Language (used only in southern Quebec;
in the north ASL is used).  But neither is mutually intelligible with
the other, and there are only a few bilinguals.

> the Anglosaxon name for "Germany" is weird

The English used to call you all Dutch indiscriminately until the 19th
century, but of course they had more dealings with the Dutch on the
North Sea than the inland Dutch or the Dutch on the Baltic.

-- 
One art / There is                      John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
No less / No more                       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
All things / To do
With sparks / Galore                     -- Douglas Hofstadter

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 15:36:17 UTC