[Wikipedia-l] Re: Klingon Wikipedia

[Andre Engels]

"Tim Starling" <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> schrieb:

> The Ethnologue, a language catalogue published by SIL International, 
> does all of these things. SIL is a non-profit organisation dedicated to 
> linguistics, language documentation and literacy. Their catalogue makes 
> a division between languages and dialects based on linguistic rather 
> than national concerns. They list 6,800 "main languages", plus dialects 
> and alternate names. This is as opposed to ISO's approximately 490 
> "languages", many of which even they admit are actually groups of 
> languages.
> 
> SIL seems to have little time for constructed languages, listing only 
> three. ISO 639-2, on the other hand, has a policy allowing any language 
> with more than 50 documents to obtain a code. Hence, Klingon is included 
> in ISO's short list, but not in SIL's much longer one.
> 
> My proposal is to automatically allow any language considered one of 
> SIL's main languages, and to only seek community approval when it is not 
> listed. I think we should largely ignore the ISO list.

I have taken a look at the SIL list, and I find it to be honest rather
astonishing. Looking at the languages in the Netherlands, I see that within
the official Dutch language area there's 2 languages according to SIL
(Dutch and Flemish including Zealandic), which sounds reasonable. But
then the part in the east of the Netherlands where Low Saxon dialects
are spoken, suddenly is considered 10 languages, whereas the many times
larger Low Saxon area in Germany is only 2. It seems that there is
measured with different measures there.

They even in some cases find 3 different languages where as far as I can
see more standard treatments (like the map on [[nl:Nederlands]] consider
them variations of the same _dialect_.

Even without those objections, the best thing to do seems not to be to
drop 639-2, but look at SIL and 639-2 for different purposes. 639-2 is
more applicable when the question is whether the language is large enough
to beincluded. SIL is more applicable when the question is whether a
language is enough separate to allow such. Still, I very much have the
impression that the criteria are not consistent in their application.

Andre Engels