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Lameen Souag | 24 Mar 2004 10:31
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Berber domain name?

Hi everybody,

I'd like to suggest the creation of a domain name for Berber.  The relevant
ISO codes are:

KAB    Kabyle
BER    Berber (Other)

but TMZ or MZ would be much better, because the term "Berber" is no longer
politically correct, and most Berbers prefer "Tamazight" (and most Kabyles
see their language as a dialect of Berber/Tamazight).  There is plentiful
web activity in Berber (mainly in the Kabyle, Rifi, and Tachelhit dialects),
and if this domain name existed, I believe contributions would start coming
in.  I know several people who would be interested in participating myself.

Yours,
Mostafa
مصطفى
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Pablo Saratxaga | 25 Mar 2004 08:52
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Re: Berber domain name?

Kaixo!

On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 01:31:33AM -0800, Lameen Souag wrote:

> I'd like to suggest the creation of a domain name for Berber.  The relevant
> ISO codes are:
> 
> KAB    Kabyle
> BER    Berber (Other)
> 
> but TMZ or MZ would be much better, because the term "Berber" is no longer
> politically correct, and most Berbers prefer "Tamazight" (and most Kabyles

The ISO *codes* doesn't have to match the language *name*.
The codes are just a an arbitrary two (or three) letter combination,
and as long as the language doesn't change, the code should remain the
same.
Now, the language can be referred as Tamazight with "ber" as the code,
that is not a problem.

> see their language as a dialect of Berber/Tamazight).  There is plentiful
> web activity in Berber (mainly in the Kabyle, Rifi, and Tachelhit dialects),
> and if this domain name existed, I believe contributions would start coming
> in.  I know several people who would be interested in participating myself.

It could be needed to create two domains, as tamazight can be written in
latin alphabet (the most common in Algeria and overseas) or in native
tifinagh alphabet.
Well, tifinagh isn't yet encoded in Unicode, but hopefully it will be
there for unicode 4.1 or 4.2; in any case it will be available in the
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Mostafa | 26 Mar 2004 07:25
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Re: Berber domain name?

Azul Pablo!

> Now, the language can be referred as Tamazight with "ber" as the code,
> that is not a problem.

I suppose that's true (as much as I dislike the remarkably arbitrary ISO list 
in general.)

> Well, tifinagh isn't yet encoded in Unicode, but hopefully it will be
> there for unicode 4.1 or 4.2; in any case it will be available in the
> future, so it should be thought about.

Yeah, there's been a fair amount of activity on that lately at the (Yahoo) 
Unicode-Afrique list; I think the new standard should be ready pretty soon.  
(As it should be, now that Tifinagh has been adopted officially by the 
Moroccan educational system.)

> Another solution could be to use the same domain, and have two pages for
> each article, on in latin the other in tifinagh (with a small converter
> program it should be quite easy to generate them), in a way similar of
> how chinese wikipedia does.

I think that would be the best solution, as Berber is still written in at 
least 2 scripts, and not infrequently Arabic as well, as in the recent 
translation of the Quran, and all three are automatically mutually 
convertible.  Also, it would be impossible to sensibly divide the domains 
without going beyond the ISO system, since "Berber (other)" includes some 
Moroccan dialects (now written in Tifinagh) some Algerian dialects (now 
written in Latin) and some Libyan dialects (commonly written in Arabic.)  How 
does Chinese wikipedia do it?
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