ISO 639 and other language identifiers

[Peter_Constable@sil.org]

On 05/07/2002 06:59:00 PM Caoimhin O Donnaile wrote:

>I see that the analysis at:
>
>  http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/analysis.asp
>
>maps nds to SXN - although I wouldn't be too sure (maybe there is
>some way of checking?) whether this narrow definition is what was
>in mind when nds was registered in ISO 639-2 two years ago.

Gary and I had no way to be sure what the intended denotation of any ISO
639-2 code was. The only clues we had to go by were French- and
English-language names, and whatever we might be able to glean from the
MARC Language Code List.. In the end, our choices were determined to a very
large extent by the principles that we adopted regarding how our mapping
choices should be made. Those principles are reflected in a paper I
presented at IUC 20, a copy of which is available from the same part of the
Ethnologue site.



- 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>