Re: chinese case in current languagechooser (was Re: Languagechooser changes)
Some information about why both Chinese written flavours do not have
their own ISO 639 code:
>From the ISO 639 FAQ
(http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/faq.html#23) :
# How does one make distinctions between traditional and simplified Chinese characters and using the ISO 639 language codes?
The differences between traditional and simplified Chinese
characters cannot be represented using the ISO 639 codes because
these are distinctions in script. The character sets can be coded
using ISO 15924 (Code for the Representation of Names of Scripts)
script codes.
Back to Questions
# How does one distinguish between Cantonese and Mandarin variations of Chinese?
The standard was intended for written languages primarily, and
since Chinese is the same in its written form for Cantonese and
Mandarin, no distinction was made in the code list. There are two
possible methods for making this distinction using ISO 639 codes.
* Use the code for Chinese and add the country code to
designate which type of Chinese you are indicating if
distinguishing on the basis of country. This is documented in
ISO 639-2 in section 4.4 and a similar instruction is in ISO
639-1:
zh-CN (as spoken in China)
zh-TW (as spoken in Taiwan)
* Use a subtag with the 2-character language code as specified
in RFC 3066. Subtags are registered with the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA).
zh-mandarin
This seems to lead us to use ISO 15924 codes for representing
languages in Unix distributions, as this is of course a matter of
language "scripts" (written languages).
However, ISO 15924 is still in the draft process and no official list
currently exists. So we have to live with ISO 639 and its
exceptions....
Please test my languagechooser 1.11 upload (should be in today or
tomorrow daily build)
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