Re: [Ltru] ar and other Macrolanguages (was: Re: Macrolanguage, Extlang. The Sami language situation as example)

Hi all,

2008/5/30 Martin Duerst <duerst@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@vicnet.net.au
lang.support@gmail.com
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