Some information about why both Chinese written flavours do not have their own ISO 639 code:
>From the ISO 639 FAQ (http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/faq.html#23)�: # How does one make distinctions between traditional and simplified Chinese characters and using the ISO 639 language codes? The differences between traditional and simplified Chinese characters cannot be represented using the ISO 639 codes because these are distinctions in script. The character sets can be coded using ISO 15924 (Code for the Representation of Names of Scripts) script codes. Back to Questions # How does one distinguish between Cantonese and Mandarin variations of Chinese? The standard was intended for written languages primarily, and since Chinese is the same in its written form for Cantonese and Mandarin, no distinction was made in the code list. There are two possible methods for making this distinction using ISO 639 codes. * Use the code for Chinese and add the country code to designate which type of Chinese you are indicating if distinguishing on the basis of country. This is documented in ISO 639-2 in section 4.4 and a similar instruction is in ISO 639-1: zh-CN (as spoken in China) zh-TW (as spoken in Taiwan) * Use a subtag with the 2-character language code as specified in RFC 3066. Subtags are registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). zh-mandarin This seems to lead us to use ISO 15924 codes for representing languages in Unix distributions, as this is of course a matter of language "scripts" (written languages). However, ISO 15924 is still in the draft process and no official list currently exists. So we have to live with ISO 639 and its exceptions.... Please test my languagechooser 1.11 upload (should be in today or tomorrow daily build) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
