From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Aug 26 2005 - 16:11:27 CDT
From: "Dominikus Scherkl" <lyratelle@gmx.de>
> Seems funny to group languages in only 3 stages of subdivisions (macro,
> isolated, dialect)... I've seen much deeper trees.
i suppose that higher levels of grouping may appear in a later part of ISO
639 that will focus on groups of isolated languages or macrolanguages, such
as families... (ISO 639-6?)
===
Same thing about the possible later encoding of "dialects" of isolated
languages (ISO 639-7?), and that are generally handled in locales, for now,
by refering to additional ISO 3166-1 or -2 area codes, and unstandardized
variant codes (note that this is orthogonal to the other level for script
codes).
So one could get precise codes later for variants like "Poitevin" (in
French) and "Maraichin" (also in French, but not found in the Ethnologue
catalogue, which apparently mixes it with "Poitevin", despite they are
geographically and culturally distant, and they have distinct phonetics and
distinct ways to spell and write conjugated verbs or to form feminine and
plurals, or to form contractions, or simply different syntaxic
constructions).
Just for info, the "Maraichin" dialect refers to the regional minority
variant of French spoken in the "Marais Breton" in the North of Vendée and
the South of Loire-Atlantique, and not to the regional minory variant of
French spoken in the "Marais Poitevin" in the South of Vendée and in the
region of Poitou-Charentes. The "Maraichin" is in fact more near from the
minority "Gallo" dialect (should I say instead "language" given that Gallo
also has its own extensive vocabulary?) spoken in the Eastern part of the
Britanny region, than from Poitevin, because Maraichin adopts the Maraichin
phonology...
I could also speak about "Picard", which is in fact so far from standard
French, because it has is own long history predating the creation of
standard Parisian French, which was just ONE of the various "langues d'oïl"
spoken in the North half of France. Also I could speak about several
distinct variants of Provençal (which is no more considered endangered) and
is, for now, considered as a single dialect of Occitan by the Ethnologue,
but which is in fact quite far from Occitan spoken in Western Spain.
-- Philippe.
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