Re: Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)
Arthur Reutenauer <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.languages |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 06:53:46PM +0000, Michael Everson wrote: > That makes arevela redundant, since hy and hye/arm are Eastern Armenian. Are they? > Hm Exactly. > according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_language hye is “Modern Armenian” in 639-3. But Ethnologue just lists “Armenian” for hy and hye/arm. Same at https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/langcodes_name.php?code_ID=26 The Wikipedia article is justified in adding “Modern”, since ISO 639-3 contains codes for Middle and Classical Armenian ([axm] and [xcl] respectively), which -2 does not. But whether or not hye/arm could mean Classical or Middle Armenian in ISO 639-2 is irrelevant to the present discussion (and a little silly). What is clear if you have access to the full Ethnologue database is that [hye] covers both Eastern and Western Armenian. From the 20th print edition, p. 359 of “Africa and Europe”: Armenian [hye] A language of Armenia. Total users in all countries: 5,169,640 ... Eastern Armenian (4,341,000) in Armenia and its Turkish and Iranian borderlands; Western Armenian (879,612) used elsewhere and only understood by some in Iran, etc. I do note that in the online edition of Ethnologue, Eastern Armenian is listed as an alternate name (if you have page views left you can see it at http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=hye). This does however not seem very tangible evidence that [hye] only covers Eastern Armenian since the description contains the text quoted above. (You’ll note that the numbers of speakers are not completely consistent.) Best, Arthur _______________________________________________ Ietf-languages mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages