Suppress-Script candidates (was: Re: frr, fy, ngo, tt)

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Wed Sep 27 21:18:47 CEST 2006


Don Osborn <dzo at bisharat dot net> wrote:

> I'm not following discussions here closely of late, so apologies if 
> this issue has been resolved. Thinking of people writing locales, 
> "suppress script" might handle the script issue if inserted into the 
> data before someone without clear understanding of the system can 
> enter in a redundant choice of (default) script. Is there anything 
> like "suppress country" (which sounds more dangerous than it is, given 
> the narrow technical focus here)?

Certainly that name would have to change!

> Has any thought been given to, at a relatively modest expense 
> hopefully, having a team of say linguist grad students create "stub" 
> locales for *all* languages in ISO-639 (attention to the 1, 2, 3's of 
> course), including appropriate suppress script/country or default 
> indications as necessary and also an appropriate range of countries 
> for a language code when it is spoken in more than one. A code like 
> "ig" carries with it a set of implications, sometimes very specific (1 
> country, 1 script), and this is the case for a lot of language codes 
> without locales. Is it helpful to make those implications explicit 
> early in the process?

Ethnologue already has a good deal of this type of information.

An early draft text for ISO 3166-1:2006 did include a column showing the 
"official languages" of each country.  This can be both contentious and 
misleading: neither the U.S. nor the U.K. has an "official language," 
and for those countries than do, it may be joined by many others and not 
even be the majority language.  (As Don knows, this is particularly true 
for European languages in Africa.)  I don't know if subsequent drafts 
still include this data.

Trying to compile a comprehensive list of languages "used in" the 
countries of the world would be both a monumental task and a highly 
controversial one.  Does one person in Nauru who speaks Igbo count? 
Even more controversial would be assigning a "default country" to a 
language; this would surely be perceived as validating that country's 
variety of that language as "the standard version" with all the 
political ramifications you might imagine.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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