--- Gerard Meijssen gerardm@myrealbox.com wrote:
Sabine Cretella wrote:
Hi Gerard and all of you,
thinking about the code I was just considering some points.
What I noted on the page you gave me for the Italian version of the ISO-code is that you use a mixed version for language identifiers - the two letter code and where there's no two letter code the three letter code - is this correct? I also noted that not all languages are present in the ISO-3-letter-code - so they are standardised, but not completely. This would obviously lead to an
own
wiktionary standard.
Wikimedia does use two letter ISO 639 codes and when they do not exist they do use the three letter codes. There are missing ISO codes. There are also the SIL codes but personally I think mixing these three codes makes a mess. Preferably ISO adds missing codes for languages.
There are omissions, mergers, splits, and other differences between ISO and SIL. ISO is more likely to include artificial languages. SIL is more likely to include very rare and obscure human languages. Neither includes Klingon yet. ISO tends to merge many languages together - every Austrlalian aboriginal language is squashed together into a single code. There is much disagreement between what is a language and what is a dialect. ISO usually takes a more political definition. SIL takes a more linguistic definition. ISO includes Norwegian Bokmaal, Norwegian Nynorsk, and just plain old Norwegian! Niether takes script differences into account. Serbian has one code whether it is in Cyrillic or Latin. Punjabi has one code whether it is in Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, or Devanagari.
I think a very flexible approach would be: 2-letter ISO if it exists. "en" then 3-letter ISO if it exists. "haw" then SIL with a prefix if it exists. "sil-PJT" or "sil:PJT" then Make up something temporary if we have to. "Klingon"
I'm not sure what to do about different scripts.
Apologies about not staying 100% on-topic.
Andrew (hippietrail)
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