Re: icons for languages

[Gudmund Areskoug <fta algonet se>]

Hi again,

Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 16:01 +0200, Gudmund Areskoug wrote:
>
> > I know, that's why I indicated "region", not "country". No matter what 
> > one thinks of e. g. Greater Kurdistan, it's hard to dispute there's 
> > currently a substantial group of people living and speaking Kurdish in a 
> > given geographic location.
>
> It's hard, but they still dispute it. Believe me, *some* maps of Greater
> Kurdistan that is supposed to where current Kurdish speakers live,
> include Azerbaijani-speaking areas, Lori-speaking areas, Persian-
> speaking areas, and Arabic-speaking areas. I don't know enough about the
> politics of Kurdish in Iraq and Turkey. That is only from my knowledge
> of Iran.

I see no problem with language areas overlapping each other. I don't 
have to go far in my city to reach an area where probably at least 70 
languages are "regularly spoken"...

> In other words, yes, contrary to what you think, it is very very
> controversial to claim that a substantial group of people speaking in a
> certain region speak Kurdish.

OK, even if it isn't a substantial group, it might still be an area 
where noone would normally be surprised to find people speaking that 
language, right?

If you take Ingrian (not sure if that's what it's callled in English), I 
don't think there are more than perhaps 200 people speaking it in the 
world today, but there's still a region where one wouldn't (or 
shouldn't) be surprised to find people speaking it.

> Danilo, would you please come to my aid? I guess you have a similar
> problem in the areas that made the former Yugoslavia.

I understand your objections, I'm just trying to find a solution.

If you feel that showing on a map where in the world one might expect to 
find people speaking a certain language is too controversial to use, 
then perhaps the idea is for the scrap-heap.

Got any better ideas for graphics/icon?

The easy way is already there, just give the ISO code, or the language 
name - but that's all just text, not graphics.

Other than that, a sound "popup-tag", that plays an audio saying the 
name of the language might be cool (please no discussion what sex, age 
or dialect the person saying it should have or not! ;) ) .

BR,
Gudmund