Scottish English
Karen_Broome at spe.sony.com
Karen_Broome at spe.sony.com
Thu Oct 20 20:07:43 CEST 2005
Beyond the need to describe these languages in the ISO context, I have a
need to structure these choices in drop-downs used in asset management
systems in a way that prevents data quality problems. As noted by others,
there is a lot of potential for confusion with the terms Scots, Gaelic,
Scottish, etc.
The Scottish English question originated as we were migrating content
previously classified as "Scottish" from an recently acquired repository.
That label, of course, means nothing.
While "Irish" may be a more common English-language term for Gaelic, and
is the ISO term for this language, I won't use it. Why? Because I have
people who will receive content identified only as Gaelic. If someone
unfamiliar with Gaelic languages looks down a list and see the choices
Irish and Scots Gaelic, they are likely to classify the film as Scots
Gaelic whether it is or not. Instead, I use:
Gaelic (Irish)
Gaelic (Scots)
These names then sort together alphabetically and the classifier realizes
that he or she must know whether the film is Irish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic.
This is not a revolutionary practice, but I thought it was worth noting in
the context of this discussion. So far I haven't had to add "Scots" to my
list. :) It's my understanding that the product I have is Scottish English
and not Scots.
- Karen Broome
"Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>
Sent by: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no
10/20/2005 09:13 AM
To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
cc:
Subject: RE: Scottish English
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Harald Tveit Alvestrand
> standard gripe....
>
> from the material available from ISO 639, there's no way of telling
for
> sure whether "sco" ("Scots") refers to a language related to English
or a
> language related to Gaelic.
Gary Simons and I identified this as an issue for ISO 639 in a paper we
presented back in 2000. On the one hand, you don't want to make the
descriptors given for languages a normative part of the standard, but on
the other hand, an identifier is meant to identify the concept of a
particular language, and it's important to make clear in some way what
the intended denotee language is. It's why the Web site for ISO 639-3
will have links to other sources that document this.
Peter Constable
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