Re: 2 many language tags for Norwegian

John Cowan wrote:

[Some ACKs for various bugs in what I've written before]

 [fy-DE]
> no mention of West Frisian at all

Pure imagination on my side.  For mixtures of low Saxon,
Dutch, and low Dutch on both sides of the green borders
it might be not only imagination - of course it doesn't
mean that using obscure tags like nl-DE are a good idea.

> 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.

Makes sense, living in Hamburg I understand the concept
that NL is the environment of Rotterdam, and that DK is
more relevant than the northern Balkan styling itself
as DE.

Just in case again, where I wrote "lbs" I meant "hbs",
belonging to "wen" as noted by Gunnar.  No Suppress-Script
for "wen", I considered this as unnecessary, the critical
point was to suppress "fy-Latn-??" instead of "fy-??".

 Leif Halvard wrote:
| In my book Frisian isn't German.

Yes, admittedly I was surprised that I got the drift of
<http://stq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aastfr%C3%A4isk>.  "fy" is
harder.  Maybe a similar effect as you've reported it for
*reading* "gsw" - I sometimes get the drift of *written*
"nl" or "da", I know how to say a few "da" words, but I'd
be lost when only *hearing* it.

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

Right, and the other also doesn't include FO and IS, I got
carried away.  Lame excuse, some years ago when AX got its
country code - I collect country codes for a whois client -
I tried to mention AX in a Wikipedia Scandinavia article.
That article was the "collaboration of the week" at this
time, and the consensus was a very restrictive definition
excluding AX, DK, and Gotland (I forgot all details, one of
those lost edit wars... :-)  

Never ever go to Wikipedia if you don't have a stable link
to the Scandinavia FAQ, and ideally Google Earth views of
the Baltic Sea showing precise borders of the Scandinavian
shelf.  A good knowledge of all rules and procedures also
helps, but that is not different from say USENET and IETF.

| You prefer that I write
|   index.nb.no.html
| in billon of pages instead?

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing, what I had
in mind were billions of XHTML pages using lang="nor-nbo"
xml:lang="nor:nbo" instead of just lang="nb" xml:lang="nb".
  
I've no clear idea how HTTP servers manage that, I never
had a (non-dummy) Web server, and a mini-BBS 15 years ago
is barely enough for me to guess what administration of a
Web server means.

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

Folks on Gmane in Norway tolerate it when I say "Hi" :-)

| 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.

All good standards boil down to some folks trying to get
it right based on what they knew or guessed at this time,
a nice aspect of the IETF, with a "so fix it" directive
if you don't like the result.  The same guy from Norway
also hosts the IETF language list among others, somebody
else reporting the latest ISO 639-2 news on this list
apparently also came from Norway, maybe it's a Norwegian
"thing" to keep this "language tag" mess under control.

 Frank

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2008 06:22:45 UTC