[Pkg-isocodes-devel] New items and Wikipedia codes

[Tobias Toedter]

On Sunday 26 August 2007 12:07:55 Clytie Siddall wrote:
> 1.
> I was intrigued by the last lot of new strings. I know I don't keep
> up with the news very well, but I thought states like the USSR and
> Yugoslavia no longer existed in those terms. I even thought that
> there was one Germany again, not two.
>
> Or are we keeping these strings for backwards compatibility of a
> weird historic kind?

Hi Clytie,

the reason is even simpler. Those countries are included in the official
ISO 639-3 standard, which lists all countries that have been removed from 
the ISO 639 standard. Due to a bug in the scripts we did not include those 
countries in the POT files for translation.

> 2. In the effort towards content negotiation, I'm putting together a
> list of language names, each in their native language. I'm not trying
> to do this for all countries (yet ;) ), but I've started with the
> languages actively supported at Wikipedia, and the ones actively
> supported at OpenOffice.org.
>
> I found that Wikipedia uses some weird language codes. See the links
> on its main multilingual page. [1]
>
> So my list so far [2] contains some language names and codes I
> couldn't find in my ISO_639 PO file, or on the webpage [3].
>
> Am I just not looking in the right places, or has Wikipedia invented
> some new languages (and the people who actively support them)? :D

I guess the missing languages are the ones on [2] where you did not give the 
English translation, but only their native names?

Honestly, I have no idea where those languages come from. Maybe some 
regional dialects? Take e.g. <http://als.wikipedia.org>, that's "Alemannic 
German" with the code "als" (I suppose). That's certainly no official part 
of ISO 639, although there are people in the south of German who are able 
to speak (and obviously write) that dialect.

> Thankyou for any order you can bring to my multilingual muddle. :)

I doubt that I've been of much help ...

Regards,
Tobias

-- 
Tobias Toedter   | A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
Hamburg, Germany |
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