[Foundation-l] Sassarese and Sardinian

Nicolò Zamperini nick1915 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 09:38:36 UTC 2007


2007/9/11, Mark Williamson <node.ue a gmail.com>:
>
> The problem is that we use international standards of language content
> codes to classify Wikipedias by language.
>
> Occasionally, there is a language variety which spans several of them,
> has none at all, or there may be several very distinct varieties
> within one code which require separate Wikipedias.
>
> Unfortunately, the current procedure of the Langcom seems to be to
> require anyone whose Wiki does not fit neatly into one of the holes
> carved by the IANA to request a new code from the IANA itself. I do
> not disagree with that 100%, after all if we are making up our own
> codes avante-gard, then our content cannot be processed by external
> sources according to language (search engines, for example). I also
> have objections to it however, but I am sure that by now these are
> obvious if you do not already know what they are (it limits legitimate
> varieties from getting their own Wiki in a relatively timely fashion,
> and discriminates against non-European languages although that is
> unintentional, they are just less well-documented in general).
>
> Thankfully, I think, the Langcom does not seek to or does not have the
> power (?) to close or rename existing Wikis, so "wrong" codes like sc
> and the like which are actually "macrolanguage codes" will not be
> closed in the interim.


It'a a problem of Langcom, but Langom could change his  "actions"

Unfortunately the current international standards are very flawed.
> However, we cannot expect them to be perfect in a world where we have
> thousands of languages and many people disagree on what should be
> considered a language.
>
> It is an imperfect standard, but it is the best that is currently
> available, so if you discover a problem in it (a language is missing,
> or a language is divided into too many parts), it is probably best, as
> Gerard suggested, to submit a correction, but be prepared to back it
> up with lots of documentation... to get a new code (I believe), there
> must be at least 50 books existing in a language, which could be a lot
> to ask for some languages, and obviously was not used as a requirement
> for when codes were "imported" from Ethnologue.
>
> However, as far as Sardinian goes, rather than combining Logudorese
> and Campidanese into a single entity and merging Gallurese and
> Sassarese into Corsican, I think it is best to add a code for
> something written in one of the several unified varieties of
> Sardinian, if not specifically LSC (for example its predecessor LSU,
> or the amateur creation Limba de Messania), because it may still
> sometimes be necessary to maintain parallel translations of a document
> in each variety, and also because Gallurese and _especially_ Sassarese
> are not usually accepted by Corsicans as pure "Corsican" and would
> probably not be allowed on the Corsican Wikipedia.
>
> Mark
>
>
We're talking about linguistics relevance of a language, not politics


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