36
votes
Accepted
Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?
Despite its name, the ISO Basic Latin Alphabet isn't particularly concerned with representing Latin. It was developed in the modern day, so the fact that I~J and U~V weren't consistently distinguished ...
- 68.3k
20
votes
Accepted
Why are letters with a stroke not decomposed in Unicode?
Contrary to what the other answers have stated, the Unicode Standard does not actually care whether Ø or Ð or any other character is “fundamentally a different letter” or not, whatever that may even ...
- 316
11
votes
Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?
Is it just a coincidence that English is the only major language that used all these letters and no more in its orthography?
Is it a coincidence? No.
But that's not the right test, because there are ...
- 8,094
11
votes
Is there a difference between Belgian Dutch (i.e. Flemish) and Vlaams?
Vlaams is Flemish. Vlaams is the Flemish word for "Flemish".
Whether to regard this as a separate language (that's vls) or as a variant/dialect/whatever of Dutch (nl-BE), seems to be a matter of ...
- 4,678
9
votes
Accepted
Is there a standard ISO language code for ”other”?
Two-letter codes are defined in ISO 639-1 and the current list does not contain a code for "other". (As Wikipedia's list of ISO 639-1 codes shows, not all possible two-letter codes have been ...
- 553
9
votes
Why does ISO 639-3 have many language codes for Arabic but only one for English?
Unifying and subdividing speech forms under an ISO code is not a rigorous ontological claim: it is the standardization statement "this linguistic thing is to be abbreviated that way". "Quechua", "...
- 83.3k
8
votes
Accepted
Which language code set (WALS, Linguasphere, ISO 639‑3 or Glottolog) should be the basis for a comparative linguistic project?
If you can afford the extra work, use as many of the lists as possible, of course using explicit tags declaring from which set the code is taken, e.g.,
<languagecode type="iso639-3">eng</...
- 30.4k
8
votes
Accepted
Does the orientation of the voiced uvular fricative IPA symbol (ʁ) not matter, or are these fonts buggy?
This appears to be a bug in Apple's system font San Francisco.
The International Phonetic Association designates the symbol for a voiced uvular fricative to be "Inverted small capital R", ʁ, ...
- 4,961
6
votes
Accepted
Change reason for ISO 639 Hebrew language code from iw-IL to he-IL
iw comes from Iwrit or Iwrith, a somewhat-archaic German borrowing of עברית (the more common German term nowadays, in my experience, is Hebräische). In the 1989 revisions, two of the changes involved ...
- 68.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Norwegian Translation Codes (no, nn, nb) - Which to use on a website?
I assume your concern is with regard to Norwegians and not compliance with some statutory requirement (if there is any such requirement, which I doubt, I am certain that it wasn't arrived at by ...
- 83.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Is there a difference between Belgian Dutch (i.e. Flemish) and Vlaams?
"Flemish" technically has a different meaning from "Belgian Standard Dutch" — the latter being the standard form of the Dutch language as spoken in Belgium, much like how "Holland" is often used as a ...
- 320
6
votes
Why are letters with a stroke not decomposed in Unicode?
For the same reason that eth (Ðð) doesn't compose into Dd + COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY. Namely, it looks like a D with a stroke through it, but it's fundamentally a different letter, and there's ...
- 68.3k
4
votes
IPA consonant chart confusion, which chart to use?
The official chart published by the International Phonetic Association is the official standard and thus should be used as the primary reference.
The primary difference between the official chart and ...
- 4,961
4
votes
Accepted
Abbreviations for pinyin and hepburn transliterations?
ISO has codes for languages (ISO 639), and for scripts (ISO 15924); but it has no codes for transliterations, as you can see by perusing ISO's standards on Writing and Transliteration. ISO adopts and ...
- 3,296
4
votes
Where can I find a language code list that includes "OVD" and "OLV"? Are they not included in ISO 639?
The Wikipedia page is just out of date. If you check the edit history you'll see the latest edit is from 2013, but the ovd code was only created in 2015.
SIL have an index which looks like it could ...
- 6,223
4
votes
Why does ISO 639-3 have many language codes for Arabic but only one for English?
"Also except for some variations in North Africa Arabs" - this isn't just "some variations" - Moroccan Arabic and Tunisian Arabic are significantly different from Lebanese or Saudi (and from each ...
- 513
4
votes
What is the name of the category that describes the ways a number can be read?
The rhythmic grouping of numbers is usually called "phrasing", e.g. "4-3 2-1-7 9-1-5-6". Within a "phrase", at least in English, there are still options regarding reading ...
- 83.3k
3
votes
What is the name of the category that describes the ways a number can be read?
I am not aware of any linguistic terminology for this particular kind of conventions. However, there is some applicable terminology from software engineering, particularly from the field of ...
- 30.4k
3
votes
Norwegian Translation Codes (no, nn, nb) - Which to use on a website?
As recommended by W3C, you should be using nb as it is more specific than the macrolanguage no.
Use macrolanguages with care. Some language subtags have a Scope field set to macrolanguage, ie. this ...
- 131
3
votes
Full list of ISO-639-6
Most likely, there never was a complete list. In October 2014 Peter Constable wrote the following in an e-mail to the IETF-languages mailing list (emphasis mine):
While ISO 639-6 did get approved and ...
- 553
3
votes
Metadata for a paper in the generative framework?
The names for the metadata fields that you drop sound like Dublin Core and the linked Wikipedia article has some explanation and further links. Note that Dublin Core metatada fields can occur in any ...
- 30.4k
3
votes
Is there a standard ISO language code for ”other”?
In Addition to @Tsundoku's answer, there is a kind of private use area in ISO 639-3: In addition, 520 codes in the range qaa–qtz are 'reserved for local use'. So you can assign in your application the ...
- 30.4k
3
votes
Does the ISO 639 standard define mappings between ISO 639-5 language families and ISO 639-3 language?
ISO themselves do not define such a mapping, but there is now a mapping list by Jörg Tiedemann available that defines mapping between ISO 639-5 and ISO 639-3 and it also includes Glottolog codes.
The ...
- 30.4k
3
votes
Accepted
ze_zh / ze_en - What language is associated with these codes?
I think this means that some of their data comes from a bilingual Chinese / English source. zh means Chinese and en means English, so it's reasonable that they invented ze to mean a bilingual data ...
- 226
3
votes
Accepted
Where can I lookup what language corresponds to a IANA language tag?
You can look these up at IANA's own site:
https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags/language-tags.xhtml#language-tags-1
In "Tags for the Identification of Languages" [BCP47] [RFC3066] ...
- 6,891
2
votes
IPA consonant chart confusion, which chart to use?
If your goal is to learn the IPA, you should use the official IPA chart (most current version, from the web page of the president of the IPA). Wikipedia's chart includes diacritics beyond the standard ...
- 83.3k
2
votes
Is there a database or standard (ISO etc.) which maps Unicode or ISO-15924 scripts with the ISO-639/Glottolog etc. languages that use them
https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/main/common/supplemental/supplementalData.xml includes a map from two-letter or three-letter language to four-letter script, under element languageData.
<...
- 121
2
votes
Identifying languages with useful 2-character search terms
Besides the languages already mentioned in the original question I suggest Vietnamese. It has a good wealth of two-Unicode-character words when encoded with precomposed characters (this precautions is ...
- 30.4k
2
votes
UCS IPA Extensions: can LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK (U+027E) be written without a fishhook?
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how Times New Roman does it, since I don't have Windows and you haven't provided any images. But let's see what the Standard has to say about it:
There aren't really any ...
- 68.3k
2
votes
Accepted
UCS IPA Extensions: can LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK (U+027E) be written without a fishhook?
@Draconis has given the core correct response, which is:
There aren't really any strict rules for what glyphs in a font have to look like—Unicode generally tries to encode semantics rather than ...
- 824
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