ISO 639 JAC decision re mo/mol

Mark Davis mark at macchiato.com
Tue Nov 4 20:23:03 CET 2008


If that's the case, then I would agree that we need to leave the
suppress-script on 'ro' - that would certainly constitute 'overwhelming
majority'.

Note that for lookup (which is our major concern), we've found that it is
best to assume  (just as a default -- in the absence of other
information) the predominant script if no script is provided -- even if it
isn't the overwhelming majority -- and even the predominant region. Thus if
zh is treated as the same as zh-Hans-CN, while zh-TW is treated the same as
zh-Hant-TW.


Mark


On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:30 AM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

> Doug Ewell scripsit:
>
> > "Romanian" as currently used in Romania is overwhelmingly written in
> > Latin.  "Moldovan" or "Moldavian" as used in Moldova (a different
> > dialect of the Romanian language, as now recognized by the RA) is
> > primarily, but not exclusively, written in Latin.  Moldovan (Romanian)
> > as used in Transnistria is primarily, perhaps even overwhelmingly,
> > written in Cyrillic.  Historical Romanian from Romania is written in
> > 'Cyrs'.
>
> This analysis is correct as far as it goes, but it is not quantitative.
> I'll conservatively assume that only people of Romanian or Moldovan
> nationality speak Romanian/Moldovan, although this is certainly false.
> The population of Romania (2002) is 21.70 million, with 90% of them
> ethnic Romanians, providing 19.53 million speakers.  The population
> of Moldova exclusive of Transnistria (2004) is 3.38 million, with 76%
> of them ethnic Moldovans, providing 2.56 million speakers.  Finally,
> the population of Transnistria (2004) is 0.55 million, with only 32% of
> them ethnic Moldovans (the rest are almost all Russians or Ukrainians,
> which is one reason why Transnistria is breakaway), providing 0.17
> million speakers.
>
> So we are dealing with a total of 22.26 million speakers of
> Romanian/Moldovan, of which a full 99% are using Latin script in Romania
> and Moldova, versus only 1% using Cyrillic script in Transnistria.
> I call that overwhelming.
>
> > Thus: the overall language that will be represented by 'ro', in its
> > various flavors, is not overwhelmingly written in any one script, and
> > consequently the existing Suppress-Script for 'ro' will no longer be
> > appropriate and should be removed.
>
> Au contraire.
>
> --
> You let them out again, Old Man Willow!                 John Cowan
> What you be a-thinking of?  You should not be waking!   cowan at ccil.org
> Eat earth!  Dig deep!  Drink water!  Go to sleep!
> Bombadil is talking.
> http://ccil.org/~cowan
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20081104/4055f910/attachment-0001.htm 


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list