Criteria for languages?

[John Cowan]

Mark Davis â?? scripsit:

> As far as I know, all Swiss Germans consider Walliserdeutsch to be a
> kind of Swiss German, and Swiss German to be a kind of German.

The issue here is not what Swiss Germans think, but what language taggers
(among whom librarians are a large and important subset) actually do.
An argument of the form "in case X, we should do D, therefore in case Y,
we should do D as well" depends on whether X and Y are truly parallel,
and the burden of persuasion is with the believer, not the skeptic.

> and by the way, if ISO were consistent, de would also be a macrolanguage

Only if "de" means "German" rather than "Standard German".

-- 
No,  John.  I want formats that are actually       John Cowan
useful, rather than over-featured megaliths that   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
address all questions by piling on ridiculous      cowan at ccil.org
internal links in forms which are hideously
over-complex. --Simon St. Laurent on xml-dev