Most seem to be okay with the addition of the country/region tag from
ISO-3166 for determing the difference between languages spoken in several
places -- this is usually what is done for English, Arabic, Portuguese,
French, and Chinese, as well.
Under Windows, they just tack on a new sublanguage to create a new LCID...
Spanish, English, and Arabic seem to be duking it out for the largest number
of ones accepted from release to release -- although they are missing a lot
of languages and dialects, on purpose, as well.
I only have a few friends in Spain.... none of them were offended at those
who would refer to Spanish as espaņol, but none of them were terribly
pleased with referring to Mexican Spanish as Castilian, either. I think it
may be similar to the French vs. Canadian French issue, just with less
emotion behind it.
michka
a new book on internationalization in VB at
http://www.i18nWithVB.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@compuserve.com>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: the Ethnologue
> Michael Kaplan <michka@trigeminal.com> wrote:
>
> >> Spaniards generally refer to their national language as "castellano,"
> >> not "espaņol,"
> >
> > FWIW, I do not know of any Spaniards who object to "espaņol" for the
> > generic language spoken by everyone around the world.... Castilian
> > they reserve for their own (pure) Spanish....
>
> Well, perhaps this is another, unintended example of a problem with
> incorporating the Ethnologue linguistic distinctions into other
> standards without serious review. If Spaniards consider their language
> sufficiently different from the Spanish spoken by Latin Americans,
> should there be separate codes for the two, or not? What about similar
> concerns with French vs. Canadian French, American vs. British English,
> etc.? How does this map intelligently to the existing (like it or not)
> ISO 639 standard? Standards intended for widespread use should address
> issues like these explicitly.
>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
>
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