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No comment and apologies to all. I was reviewing the previous discussion only to see what private notes I needed to make in my database and share with our Ethnologue staff in order to document the language, pending a positive vote (which looks quite likely). I realized too late that I sent it to the list accidentally (in fact, I was not sure where it went, since I did not save the sent message, either). Par for a Monday. -Joan Michael Everson <[log in to unmask]> Sent by: ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee <[log in to unmask]> 05/01/2006 10:21 AM Please respond to ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee <[log in to unmask]> To [log in to unmask] cc Subject Re: New ISO 639 proposal - N'Ko - Discussion Joan, did you have a comment? At 10:07 -0500 2006-05-01, Joan Spanne wrote: >N'Ko discussion part 2 > >Michael Everson <[log in to unmask]> >Sent by: ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee <[log in to unmask]> > >03/24/2006 06:07 AM >Please respond to >ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee <[log in to unmask]> > >To >[log in to unmask] >cc >Subject >Re: New ISO 639 proposal - N'Ko - Discussion > > > > > >At 23:20 +0100 2006-03-23, Håvard Hjulstad wrote: > >>The concept of a "compromise dialect between a >>number of other languages" (as stated in the >>proposal) is quite interesting from a linguistic >>point of view. Does it mean that N'Ko is some >>sort of macrolanguage? > >No. It's a literary language. Imagine that there >were a Runic orthography that people who spoke >Bokmål, Nynorsk, Danish, and Swedish all used. Or >just imagine English. Many English-speakers' >spoken language is very far indeed from the >written standard. (A favourite example is the >word "pedal" as pronounced by an American, which >rhymes perfectly with the word "pearl" as >pronounced by a Scot.) > >>The use of "literary dialect" may possibly >>misleadingly suggest that N'Ko isn't an >>individual language in its own right. > >People speak Bambara and Mandinka and Djula. >Those languages may be written (in Latin for >instance), but N'Ko is also a language and it >differs from them. It's probably originally a >"trade dialect", that is, a compromise that >people speaking those languages made for mutual >intelligibility. Now, however, it has its own >script and orthography, dictionaries and such. >It's a entity in its own right, distinct from >Bambara and Mandinka and Djula and the other >languages in the family. >-- >Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com