Re: New team for Dari (prs)

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 16:16 +0300, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 08:43:07AM -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 08:07 +0300, Tommi Vainikainen wrote:
> ...
> > > According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari_%28Persian%29)
> > > this Dari language is also spoken in Pakistan, Tajikistan and
> > > Turkmenistan. Should Dari speakers in those countries use country code
> > > _AF as their locale? Isn't such usage problematic in many ways?
> > > 
> > > Therefore I argue that technically it is better to use three letter
> > > language codes if ISO standard has assigned a separate code, because
> > > then there is no disambiguity of using country codes etc.
> > 
> > Yeah, like, because English is spoken in so many countries, why do we
> > have en_US, en_CA, en_UK, ...?
> 
> What about the case like Arabic where we have one common "ar" locale
> where all translations reside, and several "ar_XX" locales per country 
> to allow different locale settings. If Dari is spoken in different
> countries, it might not be a good idea to force all Dari speakers to
> use one single locale.

Sure, but I'm not sure that the Afghan and Tajik use the exact same
language.  Both are part of a family called Dari, aka Eastern Persian,
as opposed to Iranian Persian which is called Western Persian.

Others prefer to call the language used in Tajikistan Tajik, to
distinguish it from the Afghan version.  Both are fairly recognizable by
a native of Iran.  And Iranian Persian is recognizable by both Afghans
and Tajiks.  The root language is really "fa", as Roozbeh suggested.
Quoting [1]:

fas is the ISO 639-3 language code for Persian. Its ISO 639-1 code is
fa. There are 2 individual language codes assigned:

     1. prs — Dari Persian
     2. pes — Western Persian


So, should we use change the "fa" translations to "pes"?  No.
Note that ISO639-3 codes are more of scholarly interest.  Also according
to [2], both "prd" and "prs" are ISO639-3 language codes for "Persian
(Dari)".  No idea what the difference is.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639_macrolanguage


> Regards,
>  Khaled

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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