Celtic Macrolanguages in ISO 639-3?

Elizabeth J. Pyatt ejp10 at psu.edu
Wed Jan 5 15:13:12 CET 2005


>  See the editor's draft of ISO 639-3 at http://tinyurl.com/6kky2 ...

Since I was away from e-mail for a few weeks, this may not be 
relevant, but I did want to comment on whether some Celtic language 
codes should be designated as a "macrolanguage" or not. Specifically

Breton linguists distinguish a KLT  ("standard") Breton from 
Vannetais/Gwened Breton which can be different. The name Breton 
("br") could be a macrocode for these two varities.

Similarly, Irish differs significantly from Gaeltacht to Gaeltacht 
(native speaker regions). Tex's list already has "ga-GB", presumably 
for Donegal Irish vs. "ga-IE" which is probably standard/Connemara 
Irish. In addition, there is a Munster Irish which has different verb 
endings and syntax from either of these two.

Finally, Welsh is in a diglossic situation with a literary variety 
and a spoken variety (Cymraeg Byw), both of which are pretty distinct.

If this is not the correct forum for these questions, please direct 
me to the appropriate venue (no flaming please).

Cheers

Elizabeth


-- 
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Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10 at psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

210 Rider Building II
227 W. Beaver Avenue
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