Unilingua

John.Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Mon Sep 19 16:10:41 CEST 2005


Caoimhin O Donnaile scripsit:

> There are probably thousands of languages with more speakers than
> that and I don't see why they should be denied language codes either,
> and I do not believe that they should have to go through a process
> of individually finding a free code, submitting a request, naming
> 50 texts in the language and so on.  

You don't actually have to name the 50 texts, you just have to assert
that they exist (and that they are held by no more than five organizations).

> It seems to me to be a disgrace that 
> there is still no computing standard in place assigning codes to most of 
> the world's languages, despite the existence for many years of the 
> Ethnologue database.

Just wait a bit longer.  Ethnologue's codes are already a superset of
ISO 639-2's, and within a year or so ISO 639-3 will be available, and
Ethnologue's codes will be a (large) subset of it.

-- 
With techies, I've generally found              John Cowan
If your arguments lose the first round          http://www.reutershealth.com
    Make it rhyme, make it scan                 http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    Then you generally can                      jcowan at reutershealth.com
Make the same stupid point seem profound!           --Jonathan Robie


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