Re: [geolang-comment] what is a language

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Bandholtz, Thomas scripsit:

> To those of us who are interested in cross-cultural communication and
> developing usable literature for speakers of many languages, however, it
> seems clear that one of the main factors that must be considered in
> distinguishing 'language' from 'dialect' is how well two linguistically
> close speech communities understand each other. 

Right, that is SIL's definition but not ISO 639's, unfortunately.

> http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp is a brilliant informal PSI set
> legacy!

Note that there is now a mapping from SIL to 639.
As part of this work, SIL classified the 639 codes into the following groups:

0) 639 language has no SIL equivalent (extinct languages, artificial languages)
1) 639 language maps to a single SIL language
2) 639 language maps ambiguously to two or three SIL languages
3) 639 language maps to a group of SIL languages genetically related
4) 639 language maps to a group of SIL languages geographically related
5) 639 language maps to a group of SIL languages with a similar name
6) 639 language group maps to a group of SIL languages genetically related
7) 639 language group maps to a group of SIL languages geographically related
8) 639 language group maps to a group of SIL languages with a similar name
9) The special language groups "art" (artificial), "mis" (miscellaneous), "sgn" (sign)

> They have URLs for each country like
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Norway
> but not for each language. We should ask them to continue with
> URL-per-language.

Sure they have:  http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ENG
is a PSI for English.

Similarly, http://www.ethnologue.com/show_iso639.asp?code=eng is
a PSI for the (synonymous) 639 code "eng".

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_