On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Christopher Doty <
suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think it would take 100, but I'm not sure of the specific number;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639
Yeah, but there are codes for any number of subfamilies included in that number. So, for example, there is a Niger-Congo code, but also a Bantu code; there is an Afro-Asiatic code, but also codes for Berber, Semitic, etc. We wouldn't need to have all of these; we'd just pick a level (highest or otherwise) and only use it. We'd need (totally educatedly guessing) 20 max, with maybe a couple more for things like Basque that aren't clearly placed in a family.
> in
> part, this is because our decisions about how to group things could change
> the number. As I mentioned yesterday, we could split Niger-Congo into Bantu
> and, basically, "other" Niger-Congo. Likewise with Chinese (which,
> linguistically, is either a worthless term, or a family and not a language).
> There are only five or six major ones on the list that I've been looking
> at, but if we keep to the highest level classifications possible, it
> shouldn't be too bad.
But if we go with ISO for languages, it's hard to justify using a
different arbitrary preference for families.
I don't think it's THAT hard to justify (although a little bit, maybe :p). The language family name is something that people won't really need to look up languages by, as such, but could still tell you what family a language belongs to. Plus, while most of the ISO codes for language families are pretty good, some are really stupid (Austronesian is "map"???); I'm not sure there's a disadvantage to changing that, especially since it will show up a bunch of times in the system.
> I think using the language families has any number of advantages. First, I
> was envisioning this as something that would be both useful to linguists and
> easily learnable. I think a list of alphabetized language names in Lojban
> would be really scary, and possibly worthless, if they all started exactly
> the same (granted, you could sort some other way, but still). An
> alphabetized list with family names at the beginning, though, would actually
> group languages together by family. Plus, I really just think learning
> words which are half the same as any other word for any other language is
> going to make learning language names REALLY difficult, and thus likely
> cause these to never be adopted.
It's only the first out of four syllables that is common to all. And
the other three syllables correspond each to one of the letters of the
code, so if you know the code you know the fu'ivla, and vice versa.
Right, but because of the various forms of {bangu}, the alphabetization is still going to be wonky; personally, I would never, ever want to look at a list of any number of things that all start with the same syllable; it would make it very hard to find anything. And, really, a single syllable that's the same is not the issue--it's that it's the FIRST syllable. This makes words seem much more similar, because of the way speech is processed, than a list of words that all ended in the same syllable. It would present a rather difficult issue in terms of learning. And, in terms of being able to read a paper comparing three languages and keeping straight which is which, then if they were all more different from each other.
Chris