From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Oct 20 2002 - 21:56:15 EDT
--- Pierre Abbat <phma@webjockey.net> wrote:
> On Sunday 20 October 2002 21:03, Andrew Dunbar
> wrote:
> > I still doubt the value of the "IT" since it
> > suggests this is Italian Sardinian as opposed to
> > some other existent Sardinian from some other
> > country. Much the same as I believe "la-IT" is
> > wrong for Latin.
>
> All our language codes (except Lojban) have a
> country code, even if the language is spoken in only
> one country. So I think sc-IT is correct. But then
> there are the dialects.
Actually Esperanto is just "eo" and Interlingua is
just "in". Lojban would probably get the same type of
treatment except that it isn't covered by ISO 639.
In fact Lojban simply rejects the language-COUNTRY
model utterly and uses something different in the two
fields. I believe it's been registered with IANA or
somewhere else much as Klingon is registered as
"i-klingon" or "x-klingon". I don't think accepting
such language tags is a good idea generally. Putting
them in document language fields which take this form
is probably okay but the same tags are used or can be
used for other things such as Unix locale. Somewhere
along the line this is going to cause problems.
If we had special code to check for "x-" or "art-" it
would be a step forward but I'm not even sure what
potential problems would be. Having a language object
from which we can extract such tags when we need them
and use just the object the rest of the time will be
much better IMHO.
> As to la-IT, when Latin was a living language, there
> was no country called Italy - there were Latium,
> Etruria, Umbria, etc., and later the Roman Empire.
Exactly. Much better though I still don't think it's
right would be "la-VA" for Vatican City. Of course
this Latin isn't really the same latin as found in the
classics either is it. It probably doesn't help for
orthographic purposes which I feel is the most
important reason for the "country" or "variety" field
of the language code existing in the first place.
Andrew.
> phma
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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