> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List
> [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On Behalf Of Mark J. Reed
> Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 4:31 PM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Intergermansk
>
>
> JMW = J 'Mach' Wust
> RB = Ray Brown
>
> JMW> Does anybody know why South Africa's top level domain is
> "za", like
> JMW> in Netherlands Zuid-Afrika, whereas it's Suid-Afrika in Afrikaans
>
> RB> It is. I understand these things are regulated by ISO
>
> Indeed. ISO standard 3166.
>
> RB> I recall taking this matter up with John Cowan sometime
> in the past,
> RB> and asking why it was not 'rsa' (Republic of South Africa - the
> RB> Afrikkans is similar & the initials have been used on
> South african
> RB> postage stamps. I forget what his reply was.
>
> The ISO specifies both two-letter and three-letter country
> codes, and the top-level domain is always the two-letter
> version, so .rsa is not possible in Internet space. (The
> 3-letter code for South Africa is ZAF,
> incidentally.)
>
> There are several other anomalies. For instance, the UK's
> official 2-letter code is GB, but their top-level domain is
> .uk instead, which doesn't exist as any country's two-letter
> code (although I think it used to be the Ukraine's, but the
> ISO changed that to UA to avoid the
> ambiguity.)
>
> JMW> (I guess that "sa" was already taken by another country
>
> Saudi Arabia, in fact. Handy-dandy mapping table here:
>
>
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/codes/country.htm
>
> RB> Yes, I agree - it seems to me that regarding [Afrikaans] as a
> RB> "dialect of Dutch" is akin to regarding Swedish, Norwegian and
> RB> Danish as "Scandinavian dialects"
>
> In other words, a perfectly valid way to look at things? ;-) <duck>
>
> -Marcos
>