Randy Presuhn scripsit: > language L in general is written in script S1 overwhelmingly, > and there is a substantial corpus of data tagged simply "L". > language L has several important variants, V1..Vn > V2, a rather rare variant, uses script S2 overwhelmingly > > If there are cases like this (for example, a hypothetical community > of German speakers using the Hebrew alphabet in a manner similar to > Yiddish, or a community of Yiddish speakers using the latin alphabet) Yiddish is in fact often written in the Latin alphabet nowadays, though the orthography (more than a transcription now, I think) is not associated with any one variety and is in fact deliberately cross-dialectal. The tag yi-Latn was accordingly approved by the Language Tag Reviewer on 2003-01-07, according to Michael's unofficial list at http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso639/iana-lang-assignments.html . Beser a tsebrokhene Yidish vi nisht kayn Yidish. As for Judaeo-German, it was indeed written in the Hebrew alphabet and was much closer to German than today's Yiddish is: it's normally called "Western Yiddish" and is nearly extinct due to the combined efforts of assimilation and extermination. > would there be any need to represent this in the registry? > The tag L-S2-V2 would be preferred to the tag L-V2, right? How would > a developer looking at the registry determine this? By determining that S2 is not a suppressed script for L. Cases are hard to find, however, because the Ethnologue jesuitically defines away the problem by viewing the minority variant as a separate language, which sociolinguistically it generally is. One of the main things preventing Maltese being treated as an Arabic colloquial, or Dzungan as a Mandarin diale, or Italkian (Judaeo-Italian) as just part of the Italo-Romance dialect/language continuum, is precisely the writing system, which has profound effects in separating the minority from the other speakers of the language or language group. (If this posting seems to be about Jewish languages, it's because they constitute a large number of the historical examples of languages written in a script not widely adopted by non-Jewish speakers of what were originally the same languages.) -- John Cowan www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com Shayt oyf ir ale ver nor shklafen / Vas hunger leiden mus in noyt! Der gayst er kokht unruft teu wafen / In shlakht uns firen is er grayt Di velt fun gvaldtaten un laydn / Tzrushteren velen mir, undan Fun freiheit gleikhheit a ganeiden / Bashayen vet der arbetsman! (This may not be quite YIVO-standard; sorry about that.) _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at lists.ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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