Re: [OT] Ethnologue / Swiss German

From: Mark Davis (markdavis@ispchannel.com)
Date: Sun Sep 17 2000 - 13:27:22 EDT


> the Ethnologue staff created separate entries for "Allemanisch,"
> "Alsatian," and "Schwyzerdütsch," which *may* appease nationalistic
> preferences but definitely *does* result in inconsistency and
> confusion.

Interesting example. Some time ago I lived in eastern Switzerland for 4
years, and learned German there. The Swiss German in western Switzerland is
significantly different (I don't know how well I would have understood it
if I hadn't had a Berner as an office-mate at work for several years). The
speech of Alsace (or south around Zermat) was too far afield for me to
really understand. So if one characterizes languages on the basis of mutual
intelligibility, one might in fact distinguish at least Alsatian from Swiss
German. On the other hand, a native speaker (like Martin) might have a
different perspective.

Mark

Doug Ewell wrote:

> John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org> wrote:
>
> > Doug wants the Ethnologue to give each of its languages (uniquely
> > tagged) a single unique worldwide authoritative name. That's not
> > reasonable in all cases, though it is in 99.5%.
>
> What names are I supposed to associate with codes like SHU, MKJ, and
> SRC in my (possibly hypothetical) application that deals with language
> tags? Such associations are normally expected to be one-to-one.
>
> If Ethnologue codes are going to be regarded as a standard outside the
> confines of SIL, each code needs to be associated with a single,
> normative name. Unicode understands this concept, which is why you
> have things like U+002E FULL STOP and an explanatory note that this
> character is optionally called "period." Here in the U.S. we would
> never call '.' a full stop, always a period (or dot or decimal point),
> but in the U.K. the opposite is true, and one normative name had to be
> chosen over the other(s).
>
> Spaniards generally refer to their national language as "castellano,"
> not "español," but at some point in the ISO 639 process, a decision had
> to be made that one name would be preferred over the other. SIL
> evidently felt that way too, as "Castilian" is just one of the many
> alternate names given for the primary name "Spanish." But for the code
> GSW, the Ethnologue staff created separate entries for "Allemanisch,"
> "Alsatian," and "Schwyzerdütsch," which *may* appease nationalistic
> preferences but definitely *does* result in inconsistency and
> confusion.
>
> An inconsistent standard can be worse than no standard at all.
>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California



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