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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