Criteria for languages

[John Cowan]

CE Whitehead scripsit:

> However, on a quick check, I note that [vro] was not made an extension
> language anyway it seems (??  but I am only basing this on Richard
> Ishida's list of macrolanguages

It wasn't, and it's too late now.  IMHO it should have been.

> I did not get an accurate count but well over 100 of these are sign
> languages  (what these have in common is they all use signs--I guess
> that's something of a common encoding system though the signs vary?);

The reasons for treating sgn as a macrolanguage are historical.

> the next largest group seems to be a family in the Austronesian language
> group with the prefix ms, followed by the various Arabic languages
> (prefix [ar]),  the various Chinese languages (prefix [zh]) (both
> the Chinese and the Arabic are cases where the written forms of these
> languages is generally about identical), 2 Indo-European languages from
> India with the prefix [kok], North and South Uzbek,and Swahili .Best,

ms = Malay, kok = Konkani.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)