Criteria for languages?

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 1 21:41:02 CET 2009



Hi.  I don't know why my email:

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
    Tue Dec  1 01:06:58 CET 2009
> Hi.  This is a follow-up to my previous (Wednesday, Nov. 25) post 
> (http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2009-November/009620.html).
> . . . 

was cut off.  I am resending it (below).

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Tue Dec 1 21:00:27 CET 2009
> first group of questions is whether
> Latgalian can *correctly* be tagged as "lav", 
I have no final opinion on whether "lav" should become a macrolanguage 
encompassing both Latvian and Latgalian or whether librarians' data should be retagged--
I do note that 'lav' was not used for Latgalian at any of the online URL's for Latgalian texts 
supplied by the subtags' requestors.

> whether Walliserdeutsch can
> *correctly* be tagged as "de", and whether Walliserdeutsch can be *correctly*
> tagged as "gsw". 
Here, in my previous email that got cut off, I noted that, according to,
 http://www.walser-alps.eu/dialect/walliser-german 
both Walliser and Walser German are classified under Swiss German.

My complete email follows--if anyone wants to go through it.
* * *
Hi.  This is a follow-up to my previous (Wednesday, Nov. 25) post (http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2009-November/009620.html). 


1.  Latgalian and Latvian
I went through the rest of the Latgalian language links.

The problem for the first newspaper linked to, based in the heart of Latgalia, is that neither the Latgalian language newspaper supplement--"Moras zeme"--nor the Latvian language newspaper "Rezeknes Vestis" makes use of anything but a character set declaration as far as I can determine.
However the newspaper "Latgales Laiks" (http://www.latgaleslaiks.lv/lv/) does use a Latvian language tag because its language is Latvian, while the cultural supplement in Latgalian to this newspaper, "Latgalisu Gazeta," does not use a language tag (this seems to verify that tags are being used for Latvian but not for Latgalian, but read on).
  
The publishing house does provide keywords in English, Russian, and Latvian, using appropriate language tags for this section but otherwise does not use a language tag.

Two of the music groups are linked to via http://www.borowa.lv/  whose content-language is identified as Latvian; I don't know either Latgalian or Latvian so cannot say but assume for now that the content is standard Latvian.  
(I could not link to the groups' sites themselves.)

Several of the literature sites do identify that the content is Latgalian in the keywords--I assume that this is done in lieu of tagging the language.

Latgalian has been developing separately from Latvian since 1621 according to Wikipedia and for a time Latgalia was under Russia until opting to join Latvia circa 1920:

"The language or dialect is called Latgalian. 


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