Talk:ISO 639
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[edit] Dialects
What about dialects such as en-us? Are those part of this standard? -- AdamRaizen 14:15, 2003 Sep 8 (UTC)
- No, I believe thats just in the Internet RFCs (combination of the ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes).
[edit] Scanian
Someone added "scy" as a code for Scanian; however, I wasn't able to find that code or language in [1] or [2]. The loc.gov site appears to me to be normative, so I'm removing it.
If you have newer information (e.g. a mailing list post from a standardisation authority), please provide a source for this new code. -- pne 10:49, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Eskimo languages
I see "esk" is listed as a code for "Eskimo languages" (a better term I guess would be Yupik languages), apparently ever since the page has existed. For the same reasons given above for Scanian, I am wondering if this is a legitimate ISO 639 code. Let me know if you have a source for this code. --Iceager 10:47, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] What is bibliographic? terminological?
This sentence won't be clear for the average reader: "In these cases, the first code is bibliographic (ISO 639-1/B), and the second code is for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T)." Bibliographical? For use in a bibliography in a book if you use books from another langauge maybe? For use in a library? And terminological? What's that? For use in a dictionary maybe? So if you have the history how the word came into exist you can use the code for middle English? A clarification please.
- AFAIK these denominations, just as the whole mess with 3 different code sets, exist only for historical reasons. You're right, the sentence "For these languages, the first three-letter code is for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B), and the second three-letter code is for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T)" is quite obscure. "Bibliographic" codes are those traditionally used by US-American libraries, based on Library of Congress's MARC standards. They are derived from the English names of languages, which is not so cool (read: anglocentric). B codes are deprecated. "Terminological" codes are mostly based on self-denomination of languages, and they cover more languages. Those should be used. If a 2-letter code exists, it should be preferred over the 3-letter code. The table should have separate columns for B and T codes and show T codes first, as they're the preferred ones. --84.188.156.201 18:49, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
- there are not more T than B codes
- B should lead, because this is common, see official reference.
- IMO seperate cols are not needed. only few codes have B/T
- Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:36, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Table conversion
Since uniform data like ISO 639 codes ought to be presented in a tabular format, I wrote a quick program to do the conversion:
// File: convert-iso639.cpp
// License: Public domain
// Author: Ardonik
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
void generate(istream& in, ostream& out) {
string line;
while (getline(in, line)) {
if (line.length() < 5) continue; // Blank line
if (line.substr(0, 2) == "==" && line.substr(3, 2) == "==") {
// New section.
// End old table, if applicable.
if (line != "==A==") out << "|}\n";
// Start a new table.
out << line << "\n";
out << "{| border=\"1px\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"2px\"\n";
out << "|- style=\"background-color: #a0d0ff;\"\n";
out << "!Alpha-3!!Alpha-2!!Language name\n";
out << "|-\n";
} else {
// Just another entry in the current table.
string alpha3 = line.substr(1, line[4] == '/' ? 7 : 3);
string alpha2 = line.substr(10, 2); if (alpha2==" ") alpha2 = " ";
string language = line.substr(16);
out << "|" << alpha3 << "||" << alpha2 << "||" << language << "\n";
out << "|-\n";
}
}
out << "|}\n"; // Close last table.
if (in.fail() && !in.eof()) cout << "Could not read from input\n";
if (out.fail()) cout << "Could not write to output\n";
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
if (argc != 3) {
cout << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " [infile] [outfile]\n";
cout << " If infile is \"-\", input will be read from stdin.\n";
cout << " If outfile is \"-\", output will be written to stdout.\n";
return 0;
}
string infile = argv[1], outfile = argv[2];
if (infile == "-" && outfile == "-") {
generate(cin, cout);
} else if (infile == "-") {
ofstream out(outfile.c_str());
generate(cin, out);
} else if (outfile == "-") {
ifstream in(infile.c_str());
generate(in, cout);
} else {
ifstream in(infile.c_str());
ofstream out(outfile.c_str());
generate(in, out);
}
return 0;
}
To operate the program, you should cut the data (headings included) from the old version of the page and paste into a text file like old.txt. Running convert-iso639 old.txt new.txt will give you the tabled version in new.txt, and you can copy and paste that into the article. --Ardonik 01:19, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian
- Three letters codes "scr" and "scc" are from Serbo-Croatian and differs alphabet (scr for Latin script and scc for Cyrillic script). But, both -- Serbian and Croatian -- texts from the time of Serbo-Croatian standard could be written in both alphabets (especially Serbian, which has 50/50 texts in Latin and Cyrillic alphabet). In this table "scr" refers only to Croatian and "scc" refers only to Serbian. The question is: Is it ISO mistake (because of this possibility I didn't change codes) or Wikipedia mistake? --Millosh 07:15, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Including native names in table
Although the English name for a language is important, the native name is equally if not more important. It is arguablly preferrable to display native names on webpages attempting to alert speakers of the displayed language that content is available in their language. For example, the "In other languages" field uses native names not English ones. I think it would be a worthwile addition to include a native names column in the ISO 639 table. Many of the native names are already available from their respective language articles.
An example of what I'm thinking: http://people.w3.org/rishida/names/languages.html
[edit] Cleanup needed
I looked at the article and was unable to understand most of it. IMO, the entire text needs to be rewritten so that it is accessible to people who don't already know what it's about. --Smack (talk) 21:42, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
- It also needs to be checked for accuracy. I just removed Banyumasan from the list, because it's not listed here [3], but there are probably other languages which should be removed too. (I also added Ainu, which is on the list of updates [4], but not the main alphabetical list yet, so please don't delete it.) --Chamdarae 00:32, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
I took a stab at clarifying the discussion of Alpha-x spaces, but a lot more could be done.--A12n 14:33, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
