Re: transforms and language identifiers (was Re: Dozenal chars in music)

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sun May 24 2009 - 15:57:11 CDT

  • Next message: Julian Bradfield: "transforms and language identifiers (was Re: Dozenal chars in music)"

    Julian Bradfield <jcb plus unicode at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk> wrote:

    >> I don't believe the Ethnologue does so. If it did, it would disagree
    >> with ISO and IETF BCP 47, in which en means any English; en-US,
    >> en-UK, ...
    >
    > It seems rather silly to say you don't believe something which you can
    > trivially check.
    > http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_iso639.asp?code=en
    > Yes, it does encompass other dialects such as US Englishes, but
    > they're listed under "also spoken in", not in the head definition.

    That doesn't mean Ethnologue considers "en" to refer only to the British
    dialect. Ethnologue identifies each language with a "home" country, as
    a matter of protocol, but doesn't generally discriminate between "good"
    and "bad" or "proper" and "improper" dialects.

    > However, that doesn't really matter - all that matters is that en is
    > not identical to en-US, and your transformation varies between types
    > of en.

    "en" is an umbrella term that covers "en-US", "en-GB", and any other
    regional dialect of English you can name, right up to the point where it
    stops being a dialect and starts being truly a different language (like
    Scots).

    To claim that American English is not "English" is to claim they are
    different languages. While a clever and often-used rhetorical device,
    used by the great authors and speakers of both dialects, this simply
    doesn't turn out to be true.

    Mark Davis replied:

    > It is fine to root for the home team (or English variant),

    Considering we are talking about British vs. American English, I found
    this use of "root" amusing.

    > The code en-UK is not uniform in denotation...

    Please, everybody. It's not "en-UK", it's "en-GB". BCP 47 uses the ISO
    3166 code elements (and according to the CLDR pages, so does CLDR), and
    the ISO 3166 code element for the United Kingdom is GB.

    --
    Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
    http://www.ewellic.org
    http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
    http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ
    


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