Disputatio:ISO 639

Num volumus tabulam omnium nominum ISO 639-1? Non difficile est eam facere, sicut exemplum iam in pagina, si omnes possunt adiuvare nomina latine vertere -- nomina anglica et francogallica sunt in tabula e Bibliotheca Congressus, sed non latina. A. Mahoney 18:51, 20 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it would be much more work, but why not submit the Latin language names directly to en:CLDR (http://cldr.unicode.org/) where they can be widely reused? --UV 21:59, 20 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can we do that? Cool! If we construct the table here we can gain the consensus of the Latin-speaking community on what the names are (OK, 'lingua latina' is easy, but what's, say, 'Twi' in Latin?), then present it as a proposal to CLDR. I'll get started directly. A. Mahoney 19:44, 21 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There are (at least) two views on what is the Latin name of languages that have no Latin name. I've made quite a lot of short pages about such languages (especially in the Indian subcontinent) and I don't invent forms: if I find no Latin source I take the commonest local or international name I can find and use that, just as it is. I worked hard on finding real Latin names of languages and I think that nearly all of these are now represented by language articles with footnotes supporting the Latin name.

But we have an assiduous anonymous contributor who writes articles about countries, and that contributor invents language-name adjectives ending in -ica. This is also a field in which enthusiasts write unreferenced lists of obscure languages that interest them, giving them names that they think are Latin, and then disappear (see e.g. Linguae Romanicae). So you will find at least two systems active on Vicipaedia, maybe more than two.

Personally, I think it would be a bad plan to copy the invented names from our country articles, and from those unreferenced lists of languages, into a proposal to CLDR, claiming that they are Latin. I would stick at the language names for which we have references. You can of course find the articles that we have about individual languages easily -- they nearly all begin with Lingua ... You will immediately see which ones have footnotes supporting a Latin name. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:09, 21 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm saying you can do this, but of course so can I! -- though right now, for a reason Iustinus knows, I have to work on Roman luxury. Once that's done, if no one else has filled in the Latin column meanwhile, I could relocate all the language names for which I found Latin sources. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:42, 21 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Don't worry; I took that "you" as a generic second person! I'll peck away at this in idle moments; my priority right now (though it hasn't shown up here yet) is Ovid, on whom I'm teaching a class in July-August. I hope to get the Ovidius page up to the 30,000-character milestone (for the "1000 pages" metric) as a result of writing the class notes. I entirely agree about using only real Latin names, if they exist. I've got Gessner's Mithridates as a source to get started with -- he covers lots of random languages. (Also I'm aware the links in the table here are a bit scruffy, but that can be fixed as we go along.) A. Mahoney 22:22, 21 Iunii 2011 (UTC)[reply]