Ietf-languages Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Thu Feb 15 19:22:27 CET 2007


Lars Aronsson scripsit:

> Now you are talking about English and German, but the specific 
> example was Old Czech.  I'm not sure if that is the texts by Jan 
> Hus or the even older ballads of the Middle Ages.  But any way 
> it's Czech before the revival of the language and literature in 
> the 1780s.  So my specific question is how much such literature 
> you have available and how hard it really is to handle it without 
> having a code for Old Czech?  

I can't speak to Old Czech particularly, but even though the amount of
material *in* a particular ancient language is bounded, the amount of
material *about* it (for which language tags are also suitable as subject
references) is not.  There are only five primary documents in the Gothic
language, but there are enough secondary works to more than justify an
ISO 639-2 code element (which requires a minimum of 50 extant works).

-- 
All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part          John Cowan
that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part            http://ccil.org/~cowan
that cooks with olive oil, and the part that            cowan at ccil.org
cooks with butter. -- David Chessler


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