Addition request: alsatian
Frank Ellermann
nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de
Tue Jan 8 06:05:02 CET 2008
Mark Davis wrote:
> I haven't seen yet a convincing case for a separate "alsatian".
It's an existing variant of "gsw", with its own identity, the
Wikipedia articles about it make sense as far as I can judge it.
[variants]
> not everyone supports them (for example, Google doesn't)
Google also doesn't support many languages, they likely decide
what to support depending on the demand. E.g. parts of Google
support Elmer-Fudd "xx-fudd", Bork-bork-bork "xx-bork", Pig
Latin "xx-piglatin", and Klingon "xx-klingon", for their list
see <http://www.google.com/help/customize.html#searchlang>
> if we present two ways of doing things, inevitably people will
> get mixed up.
Creative (ab)uses of region codes to indicate the script were
one of the reasons to start 4646, weren't they ? Region codes
limited to what passes as country in the UN are often not good
enough. Maybe Alsatian is a border case, maybe it should get
a language code, not only a variant.
gsw is rather new, maybe there are also old de-FR emulations
of Alsatian. An old de-FR would be broader than a new gsw-FR,
like gsw-FR might be broader than gsw-alsatian. In the worst
case gsw-FR is not only broader but simply different.
> if we introduced "en-american" for American English, we would
> just cause confusion with "en-US" being used for that purpose.
Yes, please propose something more specific. IFF we find that
gsw-FR really is broader, then we could go for a prefix gsw-FR
for Alsatian. OTOH if it's different from gsw-FR (no subset),
then prefix gsw is fine. Saying that Alsatian is irrelevant is
no option. A possible reason to reject the request would be
that Alsatian is "in essence the same as gsw-FR". I can't judge
if that's the case. In fact I was surprised that "gsw" in the
sense "Schwyzerdütsch" is supposed to encompass "Alsatian".
Frank
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