Re: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue

From: Michael \(michka\) Kaplan (michka@trigeminal.com)
Date: Sun Sep 17 2000 - 19:13:16 EDT


Well, to cover THAT level of variation, there is only the Ethnologue that I
have ever seen. But the specific question was about language differences
that ISO *can* cover.

michka

a new book on internationalization in VB at
http://www.i18nWithVB.com/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl W. Brown" <cbrown@xnetinc.com>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 3:41 PM
Subject: RE: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue

> > Michka wrote :
>
> >Most seem to be okay with the addition of the country/region tag from
> >ISO-3166 for determing the difference between languages spoken in several
> >places -- this is usually what is done for English, Arabic, Portuguese,
> >French, and Chinese, as well.
>
> I don't see how one can use ISO-3166 regions. The region tags don't
follow
> linguistic breaks even if they are roughly geographic. For example, if I
> wanted to describe the Northeastern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese that
> have traits such as pluralizing the article but not the noun and a heavy
> native Amarican Indian influence, I would be hard pressed to find an
> ISO-3166-2 designation to use.
>
> The region might be described as a set of states where the differences in
> culture between the narrow costal strip and high desert interior is
greater
> that the differences between states.
>
> Carl
>
>



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