[Wikipedia-l] 'Proper' languages and bumper stickers

Tue Nov 8 17:09:04 UTC 2005

I'd agree with you there, except that ISO is not always nessecarily correct.

For starters, ISO 639-2 excludes lots and lots of languages (cf Ethnologue).

The (provisional) ISO 639-3 solves this, but as of yet it is not final
or officially official.

Now, the problem with that is that it follows Ethnologue's divisions
of languages vs dialects for the most part. Thus, while Moroccan and
Tunisian Arabic are considered separate languages (even people who
advocate for separate languages within "Arabic" would consider them
both part of Maghrebi Arabic), Yavapai and Havasupai or Lithuanian and
Samogitian are not. Zlatiborian, of course, is not even mentioned.
Give it time, perhaps.

Mark

On 08/11/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [ Mark writes ]
> > You think that you can claim that just because I am not
> > a Serbian, I know nothing about this issue. Well, I have seen images
> > of Zlatibor on television, and I read all about the Serbian
> > occupation. I have a bumper sticker that says "Free Zlatibor Now!
> > Boycott Serbia!", and I own some books on Zlatiborian language. My
> > deepest hope is that after the Serbian tyranny ends, I may travel to
> > Zlatibor and witness the beauty firsthand.
>
> Boy, I would give an eyetooth for one of those bumper stickers.  Trade
> you for a pair of "Zapatistas of the world, untie!" shoe decals...
>
> As long as rants about language acceptance are benig exchanged, here's
> something that has been bothering me lately:
>
> It has been suggested more than once that we should get professional
> linguists / a small group of Wiki[m]edians to determine what new
> languages are 'proper' or acceptable, before asking the community to
> discuss and reach consensus.  But should Wikimedia be making decisions
> about the officialness of languages at all?  It seems to me we can
> neutrally defer this to a higher authority*.
>
> The ISO handles ISO 639-1 and -2 reasonably well; these are standards
> designed to identify written documents, and to include those languages
> 'most frequently represented in the total body of the world's
> literature' -- which seems appropriate.  I put some specific
> information on meta:
>       http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ISO_criteria_for_defining_new_languages
>
> If you think we can do better than the ISO, please comment on that
> talk page**...
>
> SJ
>
> *  "Wikipedia includes 74 major and 7 minor[1] languages with over
> 1000 articles. ...
>    [1]  'Major' languages are defined as those with two-letter ISO
> 639-1 codes, a set of languages considered to be most frequently
> represented in world literature."
>
> **  Perhaps we can have a standard procedure that assumes an ISO-2
> code language, and provide for exceptions.  Some current non-ISO
> wikipedia languages, illustrating various reasons different users
> might have not to stick blindly to such a standard :
>  - zh_min_nan (1,200 articles; listed in places as "taiwanese") ,
>  - tpi (tok pisin, recent conlang, 160 articles),
>  - fiu_vro (Võro, 105 articles & activity),
>  - roa_rup (Aromanian; 29 articles & little activity, but just got ISO
> 639-2 approval for "rup" in September).
>  + Current well-received /proposals/ for non-ISO languages include pdc
> (Pennsylvania dutch), which already has a 500-article site independent
> of Wikimedia).
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--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin