Re: New team for Sinhala (si)

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 16:41, harshula wrote:
> Having looked at your list, that's not really trivial is it? Perhaps we
> can minimise the excess work by me explaining why the current ISO 639
> entry is incorrect?



> 1) ISO 15924: http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html
> 
> "Sinh 348 Sinhala singhalais Sinhala 2004-05-01"
> 
> This is a more recent standard, representing the script, which contains
> the correct term for the Sinhala language.

This is the name of the script, and that is/may be different from the
name of a language.

> Compare this to the older ISO
> 639:
> 
> ISO 639: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html
> 
> "Sinhalese singhalais sin si"
> 
> You will note that the French term, "singhalais" is identical in both
> standards.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything. It may be the case the two
English words "Sinhalese" and "Sinhala" both translate to the French
word "singhalais".

> 2) Sri Lanka's Constitution:
> http://www.constitution.gov.lk/presnt_const.htm
> 
> http://www.constitution.gov.lk/Conpdf/78chap04.pdf:
> 
> "Official languages 
> 
> 32. The official languages of the Republic shall be Sinhala and Tamil. 
> 
> National languages 
> 
> 33. The national languages of the Republic shall be Sinhala, Tamil and
> English."

That doesn't mean much either. For example, in the Iranian constitution
it is mentioned that all the official documents should be written in
Persian language and *Persian script*. But there is nothing known as
"Persian script" in  international circles. It's the same as the "Arabic
script".

> 3) The SLSI (Sri Lanka Standards Institution):
> http://www.nsf.ac.lk/slsi/ and ICTA (Information and Communication
> Technology Agency of Sri Lanka): http://www.icta.lk and both in
> agreement that the entry in ISO 639 is incorrect and are in the process
> of getting it amended to "Sinhala".

I would love to see some links to some relevant documents.

> Hopefully, this maybe sufficient to avert the additional work by using
> "Sinhalese" now and then having to change it to "Sinhala".

I guess we should go for Sinhalese now, and then switch to Sinhala if
the standard got changes. Arbitrary decisions of translation teams on
the English names of the languages has led to confusions. For example,
for a long time people thought that there is a "Farsi" translation team
for KDE, but not of GNOME. That would not have happened if the KDE
translation team had used the ISO name, "Persian".

> What's you view?

I really believe we should stay with Sinhalese until someone announces a
change. I recommend you contact the Unicode mailing list at
<http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html#1> for some queries on
how it can be changed, and if it is necessary to do the change. I would
also appreciate me if you CC me in the discussions, so I may be able to
help.

roozbeh