From: Mark Davis
[mailto:mark.davis at icu-project.org]
Sent: Saturday, December 08, 2007 10:45 AM
To: Doug Ewell
Cc: LTRU Working Group
Subject: Re: [Ltru] "X" vs. 'X (macrolanguage)"
Good points. My primary concern
is with the presentation of language names in UIs, and a listing of Swahili
like the following is not going to be comprehensible to anyone except for the
0.0000005% of people who are familiar with these standards. It's a bit better
with the names for Chinese, as you point out.
...
Swahili (macrolanguage)
Swahili (individual language)
...
although even with Chinese, someone is going to be confused as to which they
should pick.
Now before someone says it, I realize that the names in a UI don't have to be
the same as the names in the registry. But the closer we get them to being
understandable by mortals, the more likely it is that we will have
non-confusing names show up in UIs. We might even leave the above in the
registry, but have a note in 4646bis about the names. So I think it's worth our
taking at least a little bit of time to discuss this.
The best I could think of off-hand was something like.
...
Swahili (general)
Swahili
...
and maybe some UI device like a link on general to get to a box with more
information.
As it turns out, there are just 4 ambiguous names after removing "
(macrolanguage)" and " (individual language)":
In all other cases, the names are different, often the result of some adjective
modifying the individual language. It appears that there are a number of
alternate names in SIL; perhaps we can use one of the alternate names (or have
a note that points to the possible use of alternate names?)
doi: Dhogaryali, Dogari, Dogri Jammu, Dogri-Kangri, Dogri Pahari, Dongari,
Hindi Dogri, Tokkaru
kok: Konkan Standard, Bankoti, Kunabi, North Konkan, Central Konkan,
Concorinum, Cugani, Konkanese
msa: Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Malayu, Malayu, Melaju, Melayu, Standard Malay
swa: Kiswahili, Kisuaheli
Mark
On Dec 8, 2007 9:56 AM, Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote:
Mark Davis wrote:
> I'd favor:
>
> Description: Swahili
>
> A vanishingly small number of people will know what
"macrolanguage"
> means or how it should be translated, so having it be part of the name
> would be clumsy.
It's going to be confusing no matter what we do, because
most people
think 'sw' refers to Swahili, the individual language, and now we are
telling them that language is really 'swh'. This is worse than the
Chinese case, where at least none of the encompassed languages is called
simply "Chinese."
> I also thought we were going to have macrolanguage as a field -- that
> would be clean way to do it, and if so, then including "
> (macrolanguage)" would also be redundant.
But the macrolanguage 'sw' won't be marked in any special
way; only the
presence of other language subtags with "Macrolanguage: sw" will
provide
any clue.
I can see advantages and disadvantages to both sides here. I also don't
like exposing the term "macrolanguage" in user interfaces (c'mon, you
know the Description fields will end up there) and forcing civilians to
understand what a macrolanguage is. But then what does it mean to have
a choice between plain "Swahili" and "Swahili (individual
language)"?
And what about the people who said we MUST keep all the ISO 639 names
intact, without changing so much as a hyphen or apostrophe, so the
subtags could be related back to the standard? I hope more people
contribute their thoughts on this.
--
Mark