[Pkg-isocodes-devel] String Dutch; Flemish in iso_639

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Freek de Kruijf (f.de.kruijf at hetnet.nl):
> L.S.
> 
> In a discussion among the Dutch translators we all agreed that the string 
> "Dutch; Flemish" in iso_639 should be "Dutch". Flemish is considered as a 
> dialect of Dutch and not as (the name of) an official language. We have a 
> spelling contest each year on the Dutch and Belgium television with a title 
> in which only "Nederlandse taal" (Dutch language) is mentioned.without any 
> comments from the Dutch and Belgium public. So please make the above 
> mentioned change.
> 
> In case you don't want to change this because the ISO standard is as it as. 
> Please convey this to ISO.


Well, this should be reported by the Dutch (and Belgian) authorities,
I guess. ISO only recognizes national standard boards as authorized
advices on such issues.

However, please understand the "Dutch; Flemish" does not mean that
Dutch and Flemish are the same languages. This only means they both
share the same language code.

Having a "Dutch, Flemish" entry would be completely different of
course.

More strangely, in the not yet official ISO-639-3, it seems that "nl"
is "Dutch"...at least in the files we currently have in the iso-codes
package. And "Flemish" doesn't appear anywhere.

This could be an opportunity to use, in ISO-639, a trick we also used
in ISO-3166 and define a "common_name" field where we could put a
"commonly accepted name for the given language". This is what we used
to give Taiwan its name back while not breaking the ISO standard.

Alastair, Tobias, Li Daobing, comments?



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