Bjarte Sorensen wrote:
Lars Alvik (user:Profoss) on the debate on no:, and I
think it is a
very honorable compromise:
1. Bokmål stays at no: for these reasons:
* Interwiki-links will otherwise need to be corrected
* Other active links (e.g. Google) will be rendered dead
*
www.wikipedia.org points to
en.wikipedia.org, which is the major language
2. The interwiki-name is changed. "Norsk" is changed to "Norsk
(bokmål)" and
"Nynorsk" is changed to "Norsk (nynorsk)".
This sounds very reasonable. Everybody should be happy. I think this
is a lasting solution and not a temporary compromise. I don't see a
switch to nb: anytime in the future.
The concept of "Norwegian" language (written
and spoken) is easy to
understand and unambiguous for non-Norwegians you say. I think this
debate has proven the opposite. It is hard even for us!
I disagree. This issue is hard *only* for Norwegians. When you see
it from a greater cultural distance, you see the forest ("Norwegian")
rather than the individual trees. I'm Swedish and I understand
"Norwegian", including all major dialects, written or spoken, which
means I can go almost anywhere in Norway without a dictionary.
I wouldn't exactly call a language with a user
base of
400,000-800,000 a small language either, on a Scandinavian scale,
although it is the minor of the four.
And I'm frustrated with Swedish being such a small language, having
only 9 million speakers, the population of Michigan. Consider the
business of publishing an Encyclopedia Michigania with no market at
all in Ohio or Ontario. Still, four or five major encyclopedias have
been published in Swedish in the 20th century alone, the biggest one
in 38 volumes. Swedish and Nynorsk would just be dialects of a common
Danish tongue with 19 million speakers (the population of North
Rhine-Westphalia or the state of New York), hadn't the Kalmar union
split up in the 1520s. But it's too late to save it now.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se