ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko

[Richard Ishida]

> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no 
> [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell
...
> I think it would be inappropriate and silly to use one type 
> of apostrophe for the script N'Ko and another for the 
> language N'Ko.  To me they are not "alternative names," but 
> they create a completely arbitrary difference.  Searching 
> would not necessarily work as expected, for instance.

I didn't expect this to become such a big deal, but let me note, since I think this is touching on wider topics, that I think searching would actually be a *good* reason to include both forms of N<char>Ko for both the descriptions of the script and language tags.  

I see the description as a help for the user that is particularly useful for finding codes, ie. I usually search on a language name to find a code, expecting a match against the description. We can't assume that users will search using the ISO (or other specific) characters.  I'd be miffed if I failed to find N'Ko because I used the wrong type of apostrophe.  

By the same logic, I guess, we should add the most likely alternative forms of Gwich´in, etc.

Whether we extend the multiplicity of names to non-English variants is, in my mind, actually a related but different question.

RI


PS: Note that I'm nursing the idea of creating a web form that uses xmlhttprequest to find codes by searching on descriptions (automatically converting any escapes backwards and forwards along the way). Has anyone already done that?



============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

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