Valencian Language Tag registration request

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 17 17:38:48 CEST 2009


Hi!  My main question at this point is whether or not we need a matching variant subtag for the variety of this language spoken in Catalona (so as not to have it appear that Valencian is a sub-dialect of Catalan, but instead to treat these as two equal dialects/variants, with none being the default dialect/variant).
 

To me these are both dialects related to Occitan but these have picked up some Spanish vocabulary, which distinguishes them from Occitan (which has in its turned picked up some French vocabulary).

 

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org 
Wed Jun 17 04:04:56 CEST 2009 


 
CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> As was the case with Romanian/Moldovian, it seems that documents 
> translated into both Valencian and Catalan tend to be identical in 
> both languages, so linguistically there is very little difference 
> between the two languages.

As was the case with Romanian/Moldovan, there is only one language, not 
two.

> Nevertheless, I do feel that the requester has the right to petition 
> ISO 639 for a code for Valencian should the requestor wish to do so, 
> though 'val' would not work, as Addison has pointed out.

> One might benefit from reading John Cowan's note from a day ago:

>> 3) In August of 2007, ISO 639-3/RA rejected the request for a separate 
>> code unit for Valencian, so "talk to ISO first" is unnecessary.
Ah, I was busy & skimmed his note but somehow glossed completely over that (which was hidden down as item 3).> It would be pointless to go back to the RA less than two years later 
> with the same request and the same supporting information.  "Insanity: 
> doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different 
> results." - EinsteinAgreed, although the Universe is strange and somewhat random sometimes.

>> However, although having the code 'ca' stand for both languages may be 
>> a little problematic from a political standpoint,

> The political standpoint does not matter.  ISO 639 and the IETF Language 
> Subtag Registry exist for the purpose of tagging and identifying content 
> in human languages.  They do not exist for the purpose of settling 
> political disputes or validating people's nationalistic identity.
Well we do not offend people's political sensibilities with the assigned codes, or try not to,but there really are only so many two- and three-letter codes, and in my opinion, you probably have to take what you get; the variant subtags can be a bit more descriptive (though there are fights over these too).(And I do definitely question any theory that Valencian descended from Mozarabic while Catalan did not, because during my own quite brief work with Mozarabic I turned up much verse in Gallego that was clearly uttered in sort of a tenson with the Mozarabic kharjas or 'refrains' that authors of poems in Iberia included at the end [perhaps these 'refrains' came from popular Mozarabic songs that the writers of the poems had heard].So to me Gallego was certainly influenced by Mozarabic and Spanish at least in part descended from it; so I can't see a unique descent for Valencian from Mozarabic-- though I may be quite wrong, and I suppose this is not the place to discuss this anyway; in any case today a text translated into Valencian is not different from the same text translated into Catalan and that's enough for me)  >  . . .> Under BCP 47, the language-variant combination "ca-valencia" is 
> available to distinguish "Valencian" from "Catalan."  Whether the 
> difference is one of dialect, orthography, vocabulary, or what have you, 
> this is more than sufficient and no other solution is neededWhich brings up the issue foremost on my mind.  Should we, at this point, apply for a second variant subtag, for the Catalan variety of Catalan-Valencian,to keep things perfectly perfectly balanced?  (And so as not to seem to favor one variant or the other?)
> --
> Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at openprogress.org 
Wed Jun 17 12:37:27 CEST 2009 
> Hoi,
> There is a difference between the literature of the Dutch and the Belgians.
> Given the prominence of libraries in the history of the ISO-639 I expect
> that this is an explanation for this.
> Thanks,
>     Gerard
Interesting.  What other literatures will we ultimately have to distinguish? Best, C. E. Whiteheadcewcathar at hotmail.com
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