Re: Armenian (was: Re: ISO 639-3 changes, part 3)

In our proposal we noted that the ISO 639-5 code “hyx” exists for “Armenian (family)”. I would recommend this be the “macro-language” (since it can hardly refer to anything else). I think that the national language of modern Armenia is hy/hye/arm, though of course many hyw texts would have been filed under those since there was now hyw before now. And the same would be for the older edition of the Ethnologue, but disunification brings with it such things. That’s normal.

I don’t know who decides this one. I can easily decide to deprecate arevmda in favour of hyw. I would be inclined to deprecate arevela under the terms listed above unless there is some reason not to.

> On 8 Mar 2018, at 21:35, Arthur Reutenauer <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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.  

Except both Eastern and Western Armenian are modern. And there does exist hyx.

> 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.

I don’t suppose that description is normative.

Michael
_______________________________________________
Ietf-languages mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages