From: "David Tooke" <dtooke@interproinc.com>
> I noticed from that list that there are quite a few languages that do not
> have 2 character ISO 639 codes.
>
> Balti Baluchi Berber Hausa Karaite Kurmanji Luri Mazanderani
> Moplah
> Pulaar Siraiki (also known as Saraiki or Lahnda or Western Panjabi)
> Sulu
>
> Is it true that one would not be able set their browser locales to these
> languages as it appears ISO 639 is a pre-requisite for this?
I do not think that is universally true, no.
> plus...
> dumb question 1. Is Aramaic (which doesn't seem to have a 2 character ISO
> code) the same as Amharic (which does...AM)? If not, Amharic appears to
be
> a Semetic language too, is that written right-to-left too?
Amharic uses the Ethiopic script, and is not RTL as far a I know. Aramaic
has no native speakers (unless you count Hugh Nibley, who reportedly wigged
out during a class one day and started lecturing in Aramaic -- witnessed by
two people I know among the 50+ in the class!).... so while you may have
Aramaic content, you probably would not have you machine set to use it as a
locale. :-)
> dumb question 2. Are there an known cases where the full locale name
> (language+country+variant) has a different directionality as for the root
> language? I know that some languages are written in different scripts
> based on the locale; are there any cases where there are a two scripts
that
> have the same language code in their locale but differ in their writing
> direction?
Well, there are some languages in the former Soviet Union that are
considering an Arabic script either instead of or in addition to existing
Latin/Cyrillic scripts. Not sure if any have been officially adopted?
BTW - I try not answer stupid questions, so you can assume I disagree with
your characterization since I answered them. :-)
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
http://www.trigeminal.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:17 EDT