Tessa Fallon wrote:
> My apologies, I hit send before I was finished!  The ISO abbreviations 
> (I believe) reflect the spelling of the language in that same language, 
> so "Croatian" is "hrv", Moldovian/Romanian is abbreviated "rum" (Rumanian).


FYI it looks as though the MARC codes are reflecting the perception of 
the Serbo-Croat language as unified in the former Yugoslavia, albeit 
Croatia favoured the Roman alphabet (hence "scr"?) while Serbia 
historically favoured Cyrillic ("scc"). Post-independence, the languages 
have naturally (re)asserted these and other distinctive differences.

A related issue affects the language of Moldova: as a Soviet republic 
Moldova used Cyrillic, though the language is effectively Romanian, 
which uses Latin. This may be connected with why MARC chooses to 
distinguish Moldovan from Romanian (though it's equally true that the 
same language spoken in two different countries rarely stays the same 
for long! ;)

Something like that, anyway - these things are a political and 
historical minefield, I hope I've stepped lightly enough around what to 
some may be sensitive issues!

Richard




-- 
Richard M. Davis
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