Thank you to all of you for getting back to me so quickly, and for the information you have provided.
Picking up Dom's question below, on the subject of the new IANA registry, as I said in my earlier email, I have only taken a quick look, but it seems to combine the previous 2- and 3- character codes with the principle that where you have a choice between them, you _must_ use the shorter. So, to take an example which I have been looking at recently, Amharic has a 2-character code (am) and a 3-character code (amh), and it looks to mandate the use of 'am'. I guess at least this removes any ambiguity -- but may not help if you have software which expects to have a specific kind of code. Jamie -----Original Message----- From: domcox [mailto:domini...@corbex.org] Sent: 12 January 2021 16:17 To: SWORD Developers' Collaboration Forum <sword-devel@crosswire.org> Cc: Jamie <ja...@critos.co.uk> Subject: Re: [sword-devel] ISO language codes Jamie writes: > The Sword config file contains an ISO language code. Is anyone able > to tell me what this gets used for (and more specifically, whether > there is any requirement as to whether this should be a 2-character > code or a 3-character one)? I not have much knowledge of this, but after a quick look at the source code, I saw the ISO language code is used by the transliteration filter. ISO language code is also used by the Xapian search engine, I suppose we can't search Chinese or Hebrew or English texts the same way. See: https://xapian.org/docs/stemming.html And if I recall correctly, ISO language code is used in Lucene searches by JSword. > (In fact I see IANA now have a new registry of codes which > supersedes the > 2-char and 3-char lists, but it looks as though this merely > mandates the use > of the old 2-character codes where available, and 3-character > otherwise.) Is there a benefit over the SIL database? SIL International is the registration authority for ISO-639-3. "SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is a Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages, and aid minority language development." -- Dom _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
