[OT] Re: Country codes

Thomas Chan <tc31 at cornell dot edu> wrote:

>> The "eurodns" site that Kevin referred to does show the standard "kr"
>> as the code for South Korea, not "ko".
>
> That sort of confusion between country and language codes is not
> uncommon, perhaps due to a small number that coincide, e.g., fr, de,
> es, etc.
>
> The Korean case is also complicated by the kp country code for North
> Korea.

I hadn't drawn the connection to language codes.  Yes, of course, "ko"
is the ISO 639 code for the Korean language, but there is no country
code "ko" -- North Korea is "kp" (for People's Republic of) and South
Korea is "kr" (for Republic of).

Similarly, the Vietnamese language is coded "vi" but the country is
coded "vn".  (Before 1975, there was also a Democratic Republic of
Viet-Nam (South), coded "vd".)

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/