--- Gerard Meijssen <gerardm(a)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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