Brion Vibber wrote:
ilooy wrote:
I'd like to suggest that taking into consideration ISO codes or SIL codes may be one solution. This would mean that an outside group which is well established and has looked into the matter has deemed a certain language important enough to be assigned a separate code.
This is exactly the policy we adopted several years ago, which has proved insufficient.
Relying on existence of ISO codes brings us:
- split Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian replacing Serbocroatian [controverial]
- Klingon
etc
and denies various languages/dialects/whatever which don't have their own codes but which are oft asked for.
Yes. It's really important that everyone gets this. The idea of referencing these external codes is and was a great one in many ways... it gets the argument out of our hands, it could presumably be a professionally-decided list, etc.
The only problem is that the list of ISO codes is highly politicized and broken in many many ways. It was fine for getting a list of things like "English" and "German" and "French" and so on, but it breaks down when you start looking at it more closely.
--Jimbo