Criteria for languages?

Kent Karlsson kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se
Mon Dec 7 11:15:10 CET 2009


Note that "gem" and "gmw" are collection codes, and they
are not suited to be made "macrolanguage" codes. See
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-5/id.php.

I also see that "de"/"deu" is given as "Standard German"
in Ethnologue, not "any kind of German"... Ethnologue lists
19 languages as "German", 41 languages as "West Germanic"
('gmw'), and 48 languages as "Germanic" ('gem'). See
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=209-16.
I know, this hierarchy is not formally bound to ISO 639,
but it is still indicative.

    /kent k




Den 2009-12-07 06.08, skrev "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>:

> Hi -
> 
>> From: "CE Whitehead" <cewcathar at hotmail.com>
>> To: <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>; <ietf-languages at iana.org>; <iso639-3 at sil.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2009 3:47 PM
>> Subject: Criteria for languages?
> ...
>> For possible macrolanguages there's not only gem and de but also gmw.
> 
> As a germanist, I'd consider gem or gmw to rather inappropriate choices for
> Walliserdeutsch.  I believe de would also be wrong, because even though it is
> the
> most likely fallback language choice, this is due to diglossia rather than a
> "variety of"
> relationship.
> 
> This is one of the situations where having a macrolanguage *per se* available
> provides limited value.  It's relatively easy for a speaker of German to say
> "that sounds like gsw."  And that's a useful bucket for classifying material.
> 
> However, there are a lot of mutually more-or-less incomprehensible varieties
> of gsw,
> and a typical speaker of German (or even gsw) isn't necessarily going to be
> able
> to tell you which of these a given sample of gsw is.  (Rather like asking an
> inexperienced American to identify the dialects of rural England.)  This is
> what makes having a gsw tag useful, not the availability of a form of gsw
> that would serve the same function as zh-cmn. Knowing that these are
> closely-related languages is interesting, but not always helpful.  When
> the need arises for a speaker of one communicate with a speaker of a
> non-adjacent one, the likely choice will be de rather than gsw.
> 
> Randy
> 
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