Re: the Ethnologue

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 14:35:47 EDT


On 09/14/2000 10:29:52 AM John Cowan wrote:

>In a nutshell: The Ethnologue treats Valencian as a dialect of Catalan,
which
>is correct based on the mutual intelligibility criterion, but they have
distinct
>orthographies. Unfortunately, the two are in the same country, so the
3166
>trick (en-us vs. en-gb, e.g.) doesn't work. (If Valenciana has a 3166-2
>regional code, we could do something there, perhaps.)

Thanks for the clarification. Orthography is a paralinguistic notion that
certain IT processes need to be sensitive to, but that Ethnologue does not
attempt to record. I have said that there is a need for further research to
establish what paralinguistic notions are needed by what processes and what
would be appropriate enumerations for these other notions, and that
Ethnologue codes would not solve that problem. I have also argued that such
enumerations would build off a comprehensive enumeration of languages, not
be a departure into a completely different direction, and that we should
proceed with adopting such a comprehensive list of language identifiers
right away. There's no question that further work will be needed.

- Peter

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>



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