Re: [Ltru] Consensus call: extlang

[Peter Constable <[e-mail]>]

> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
> Broome, Karen


> The historic registrations of other tags (such as zh-yue and
> zh-min-nan) clearly shows that "zh" has always included Cantonese and
> other Asian languages...
> It seems like you are indicating that "zh" is the shortest
> tag for Mandarin, but not Cantonese...

Do all keep in mind comments I made a week or two ago about historical development leading up to macrolanguage:

- the macrolanguage concept means that some treat it as one language while some treat it as many

- the alpha-2 code in ISO 639-1 was initially created by terminologists, for whom developed language varieties would have been of interest, which for "Chinese" would have been Mandarin

- the alpha-3 code in ISO 639-2 was created (in part) by librarians, for whom "Chinese" was explicitly meant to cover both Mandarin and Cantonese


The different points of view expressed by Karen and by Mark are, I think, not surprising or coincidental: the need to be clear that "zh" includes Cantonese as well as Mandarin is appropriate and is consistent with existing use exemplified by library practice; and the utility, in practice, of recognizing a particular association between "zh" and Mandarin in some applications (though not necessarily all) is also appropriate and stems from the same factors that were involved in the practice of Terminologists: for a lot of business application to date, the only Chinese language with particular relevance for text scenarios has been Mandarin.

There are two realities; both need to be recognized. I see that happening by saying something to the effect of, "'zh' _means_ "Chinese"; in some applications, especially text scenarios, it may be appropriate to treat use of 'zh' in existing implementations as being particularly associated with Mandarin".


Peter


Peter
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