Distinguishing Greek and Greek

John Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Wed Mar 16 19:49:53 CET 2005


Panagiotis Sikas scripsit:

> I assume that since there is no other language (or derivative) in
> the catalogue of the official European Languages, the same applies
> to Cyprus as well. I don't know if there are more than one official
> languages in Cyprus (English or Turkish) but this is another
> discussion...

Greek, Turkish, and English are all official in Cyprus.

> >3. is there an existing icon traditionally used to indicate a page in 
> >Greek language other than a Greek or Cyprus flag?
> 
> haven't seen anything else used....

<rant>This whole business of flags as language icons is absurd.  The flag
for English is almost invariably the U.K. flag, yet only about 12% of
English-speakers live in the U.K.  Indeed, no one country contains a
majority of the world's anglophones.  Per contra, India has 16 official
languages, so the flag of India would convey little or nothing in a
multilingual context.

The appropriate icon for a language is the name of the language expressed
in the script of the language:  "English", "Deutsch", etc.  Those who
cannot read this word have no use for the text it links to.</rant>

--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
        --Nicholas van Rijn
                John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com>
                        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan  http://www.reutershealth.com


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list