[Wikipedia-l] Re: no:/nb:/nn:/etc. - modified suggestion

[Stephen Forrest]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:51:19 -0500, Olve Utne <utne at nvg.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:17:35 +0200, Andy Rabagliati wrote:
> >Amongst some truly great discussion, we should remember pt:, and ask again
> >if all the nn: and nb: folks could swallow their differences and skim
> >through the other dialect as if it were their own. We have been told that
> >they all understand both.
> 
[snip]
> As for Alemannish, I have no serious problem reading it with my background
> in knowing German, Yiddish and some Dutch. But I will not ask for it to be
> closed down, and I do not think would be appropriate in any way for me as
> an outsider to tell them to quit their project and work only within the
> German or French wikipedias instead!

I don't think any of your many analogies about linguistic communities
than can read multiple languages apply here.  Bokmål and Nynorsk are
(apparently) separate orthographical conventions for the same spoken
language, which is not true for any of your other examples (e.g.
Alemannic is not spoken like German or French).

That said, if  Bokmål and Nynorsk differ orthographically to the
degree that people have said, the idea of having two wikipedias
certainly makes sense to me.

Just one more middling factual point:

[snip]
> fact support. The topic we are discussing is whether the mostly Bokmål
> Wikipedia on no: should move from the countrycode no: for Norway to the
> language code nb: for Bokmål. Also, we are discussing -- and your input

In this context, 'no:' is not the ISO countrycode for Norway (NO) but
the ISO 639-1 language code for the Norwegian language (no).

None of the wikipedia subdomains correspond to country codes.  For
example, Swedish wikipedia is sv.wikipedia.org (because Swedish
language has ISO 639 code 'sv'), even though the country code for
Sweden is SE.

Steve