From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sun May 24 2009 - 15:57:11 CDT
Julian Bradfield <jcb plus unicode at inf dot ed dot ac dot uk> wrote:
>> I don't believe the Ethnologue does so. If it did, it would disagree
>> with ISO and IETF BCP 47, in which en means any English; en-US,
>> en-UK, ...
>
> It seems rather silly to say you don't believe something which you can
> trivially check.
> http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_iso639.asp?code=en
> Yes, it does encompass other dialects such as US Englishes, but
> they're listed under "also spoken in", not in the head definition.
That doesn't mean Ethnologue considers "en" to refer only to the British
dialect. Ethnologue identifies each language with a "home" country, as
a matter of protocol, but doesn't generally discriminate between "good"
and "bad" or "proper" and "improper" dialects.
> However, that doesn't really matter - all that matters is that en is
> not identical to en-US, and your transformation varies between types
> of en.
"en" is an umbrella term that covers "en-US", "en-GB", and any other
regional dialect of English you can name, right up to the point where it
stops being a dialect and starts being truly a different language (like
Scots).
To claim that American English is not "English" is to claim they are
different languages. While a clever and often-used rhetorical device,
used by the great authors and speakers of both dialects, this simply
doesn't turn out to be true.
Mark Davis replied:
> It is fine to root for the home team (or English variant),
Considering we are talking about British vs. American English, I found
this use of "root" amusing.
> The code en-UK is not uniform in denotation...
Please, everybody. It's not "en-UK", it's "en-GB". BCP 47 uses the ISO
3166 code elements (and according to the CLDR pages, so does CLDR), and
the ISO 3166 code element for the United Kingdom is GB.
-- Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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