Scríobh "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > ... > Language variants are not distinct because of a national border > ut because a long history of separation of peoples and atachment > of peoples to an origin culture in times of political conflicts or repressions. > ...
That is true. As a dialectologist by calling, I must agree with you there. > Then English in each area can be correctly labelled: "en-IE" is general > English as spoken in the whole Ireland. > ... That is what I would like to use for Hiberno-English, if it has not already been registered. I also feel very strongly that cultures overlapping international boundaries should be tagged by consensus between relevant national bodies (in this case BSI and NSAI), rather than fall victim to inexpert advice. > I am not sure why this discussion goes into the Unicode list... That is a technically messy story. Do you recall my supplying 'quick brown fox' examples, showing Irish has a different Unicode/ISO 10646 character set to Gaelic and Manx, which have their own distinctive charsets? Well, there is some interest in the university here in extending that approach to see if we could do the same with frequency measures of IPA charsets to tentatively fix borders between dialects, treating sounds as isoglosses, as it were, in tandem with our usual syntactic/wordstore analyses. No idea if that would work, but it is something I wish to raise first within a more local NSAI forum. mg -- Marion Gunn * EGT (Estab.1991) * http://www.egt.ie * fiosruithe/enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *