Preliminary proposal for 225 language-country pairs

[Peter_Constable@sil.org]

On 02/18/2002 10:27:16 PM John Cowan wrote:

>But by all reports en-PT is pretty different from en-US or en-GB.
>SIL goes so far as to call it a separate language.

Wait a moment, please, John. Let's clarify this statement somewhat. You're 
saying that SIL has made a judgement about "en-PT", but we have not. Our 
researchers have determined that English [ENG] is spoken / used in 
Pitcairn, as is a distinct language alternately known as 
"Pitcairn-Norfolk" or "Pitcairn English" [PIH]. In order to interpret your 
statement, I have to decide whether you are taking "en-PT" to correspond 
to the [ENG] entry for Pitcairn or the [PIH] entry. If the former, then 
Ethnologue is not reporting it as a distinct language, as evidenced by the 
code [ENG]. If the latter, then Ethnologue does claim it is a distinct 
language, but I would not propose that it be tagged per RFC 3066 as 
"en-PT". That would be very problematic in my mind, and I think it would 
be bad practice.



- Peter


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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>