Montenegrin

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Wed Jun 16 20:04:02 CEST 2010


Milos Rancic scripsit:

> If I could dream for a little bit, a proper tag of, let's say, Serbian
> language could be for example:
> indo_european-slavic-balkan-synthetic-shtokavian-serbian and for
> Pidgin (a creole language, not a type of languages)
> mixed-(sino_tibetan-chinese-cantonese-...)-(indo_eurpean-germanic-anglo_frisian-english)
> or similar. Probably, with some numbers in one repository which would
> describe closeness inside of the hierarchical group or, better, with
> more descriptive explanations inside of the repository.  But such
> notification is not supported by any system.

ISO 639-6 (which is still in draft, and is not part of the BCP
47 evolving standard) is based on exactly such a system.  However,
explicitly putting such relationships into tags is not only politically
sensitive, but unstable from a strictly scientific viewpoint.
Indo-European relationships (except at the topmost level) are pretty
well accepted, but the same is not true in general around the world.
Even such a question as "How many top-level language families exist?"
does not have a definite answer.

> The problem with "macrolanguage" tag is its ambiguity. Is it (a)
> genetically related dialects; (b) genetically related standard
> languages; (c) genetically related language groups; (d) genetically
> relatively close languages; (e) genetically relatively close languages
> with the same cultural background; (f) ... with different cultural
> background; (g) ...?

A macrolanguage is a group of language varieties which are treated as
a single language for some purposes and as multiple languages for
other purposes.  That definition is intentionally broad so that it
can cover many particular cases.

-- 
XQuery Blueberry DOM                            John Cowan
Entity parser dot-com                           cowan at ccil.org
    Abstract schemata                           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    XPointer errata
Infoset Unicode BOM                                 --Richard Tobin


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list