Hoi,
Purodha what you say about Ethnologue is very biases, wrong and often
hardly relevant. When you know your history, Ethnologue was asked if they
would bring in their expertise and system in the ISO processes because the
existing ISO-639-2 was extremely inadequate. When it was included, it
became part of an established process whereby experts from national
standard bodies decide on the further development. Effectively the role of
Ethnologue is one of administrator, not initiator.
Saying that all the issues about languages is because to Ethnlogue is
completely false.
The notion if there are many more languages is very much open to debate.
There is no good answer. When you are interested in looking beyond the
ISO-639-3 consider the ISO-639-6. It aims to include any and all language
variants and it is not that interested in using the political term what
language has become.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 6 May 2014 14:02, P. Blissenbach <[email protected]> wrote:
> "Scott MacLeod" <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Hi Joe, Magnus, Andrew, GerardM, Jane, Daniel and Wikidatans,
> > Since "Language fallback is not a luxury like it is for
> > British English, it is essential for all the smaller languages.
> > It is what prevents it from being editable / usable" (per GerardM),
> > and in terms of Reasonator, statements, and careful design (DanielK),
> > what are current Wikidata processes to plan eventually for all
> > 7,106 living languages (plus even dead and invented languages)
> > in the world per "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth
> edition"
> > (http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size), as people add them, and
> use,
> > for example, the ISO coding system (or similar) for this, to anticipate
> > not yet added languages, and especially for 'smaller' languages
> > that GerardM mentions?
>
> Just FYI, the ISO 639 and Ethnologue are grossly incomplete in their
> coverage of world languages. One must assume some 10 times to 100 times
> more natural languages are currently in use than listed.
>
> Some single additions have been made through the BCP47 and IANA, such as
> "en-GB-scouse" representing the Scouse dialect of British English, or
> "sl-rozaj-lipaw" — the Lipovaz dialect of Resian which is itself a
> variant of Slovenian spoken in Italy. In other fields, due differentiation
> is still lacking. For example, in the swiss Alps, almost ever village in
> ever vallley has its on language variety which are often mutually hardly
> comprehesible, but they all together have only one language code, "gsw",
> wich also covers a large part of Germanies South West and South Eastern
> France and their local language varieties. You can easily look up from
> a map that there are hundreds of cities, towns, villages, valleys, and
> even if only a thenth of them had a language of their own, "gsw" actually
> represts more than 1000 distinct languages. Considerig both spelling AND
> pronunciation, the deserve to be differenciated.
>
> This is not meant do discourage you, or to say it was not manageable.
> You only need to be aware, that taking care of the few languages currently
> listed in ethnologue will not suffice, and coding them must be expected
> to be a bit more complex, than it appears at first sight.
>
> > In terms of British English (en-gb) and English (en) distinction,
> > why not just code English in Wikidata as "ISO 639-3eng" per
> >
> http://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng[http://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng]
> > as part of a careful design for all languages, and then build
> > out for smaller languages? (CC wiki WUaS is planning wiki schools
> > in all 7,106 languages, plus dead and invented languages).
>
> While the current 7106 is way too low, it does include some
> "Macrolanguages"
> (i.e. language groups) and many extinct and some invented languages.
>
> > It seems that using or keying in on the ISO system, or a similar
> > one, would allow for remarkable extensibility and careful design
> > of Wikidata, as well as fallback for other languages such as Hindi,
> > Odia or Malayalam.
>
> Yes indeed, only blindly following a body like SIL (editor of ISO 639-3
> and Etnologue, btw. a fundamental christian missionary organization) with
> their rather slow process of adding languages (taking years) might be
> limiting our capacities and speed. I suggest that we evaluate our own
> needs first, then determine how to meet them best, and then cooperate with
> others.
>
> Purodha
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikidata-l mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
>
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
