Re: Intergermansk

JMW = J 'Mach' Wust
RB = Ray Brown

JMW> Does anybody know why South Africa's top level domain is "za",
JMW> like 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 "dialect
RB> of Dutch" is akin to regarding Swedish, Norwegian and Danish as
RB> "Scandinavian dialects"

In other words, a perfectly valid way to look at things? ;-)  <duck>

-Marcos

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