Hi all, 2008/5/30 Martin Duerst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>: > So based on the above analysis, when it comes to ar- for Arabic, > count me in. > except there are cases when this will get messy. the best example of problems with Arabic as a macrolanguage is pga Sudanese Creole Arabic (Juba Arabic), a creole assigned to the Arabic macrolanguage. One key difference between Juba Arabic and all other languages belonging to the Arabic macrolanguage (other than the fact it is a creole) is the question of default writing script. Most publications in Juba Arabic are written in the Latin script rather than the Arabic script. > >>- Don Osborne has several times over the past couple of years mentioned >>interest in the macrolanguage concept wrt African languages because of >>(IIUC) trends toward evolution of varieties used for wider communication. >>But it's not clear to me that macrolanguage is the appropriate concept >>there, as opposed to a distinct, individual language, and even if these are >>considered macrolanguages I don't see requests to have extlang for these >>cases: if anything, the emerging variety used in wider communication makes >>the local varieties *less* relevant for tagging purposes, not more. > > Well, yes, the emerging variety may make the local varieties less > important, but are we not already at exactly this situation for > Chinese and Arabic? For me, the concern here is much more that > these are currently very fluid situations, and whether extlangs > or not, we are not really good at dealing with fluid situations. > fluidity is a problem we are already noticing it with Dinka documents, where traditionally documents were written for a specific dialect and one fo the five ISO-639-3 language codes would be most appropriate, but somre of the documents being produced for educational purposes by Dinka expats would be more suitably identified with the ISO-639-2 code since the documents aren't written in a specific dialect, but rather in an emerging Dinka influenced by each of the dialects. -- Andrew Cunningham Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator State Library of Victoria Australia andrewc at vicnet.net.au lang.support at gmail.com _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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