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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately the 2 and 3 letter abbreviations (Alpha-2 and Alpha-3) didn't change. Typically we'd use the abbreviations for analysis, feature encoding, etc. and the full name only for display and human interface use (like for autocompletion), where most people will probably be more comfortable with and continue to use the old names for a while.

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In EU communications (including statistics), Greece is referred to by the "EL" abbreviation, instead of ISO Alpha-2 code "GR" (as all other countries are). It confused me a few days ago.

Similar to Switzerland (CH).

I don't see any similarity. CH/ch is the one and only abbreviation used about everywhere. Which other one would be used by whom? The letters might not be obvious to any speaker of a living language. But that's intentionally I understood. They have several national and egen more local languages, so they chose an abbreviation from Latin.

GR/gr is ISO for Greece, but EU uses EL/el the previous commenter wrote. The latter seems to come from Greek language, although then spelled using the Latin alphabet

How are those cases similar, except for it's not obvious to the average English speaker where some letters came from?

I don’t understand: “CH” is the ISO Alpha-2 code for Switzerland. What would be confusing to commenter Gare?

Are you sure its not in reference to "Greek" the language, rather than "Greece" the country? "el" is coding for Greek in ISO 639, IANA language subtags, etc.

It does seem to be EL for the country. See, for example: https://publications.europa.eu/code/pdf/370000en.htm

EDIT: Perhaps it would have been nice if ISO 639 and ISO 3166 had been better coordinated so we didn't have cs_CZ, da_DK, sv_SE, ...

I wonder if the oddity here is really the ISO alpha-2: Spain and Germany get abbreviations based on their native-language names, but not Greece.

But the standard 2-letter code for the Greek language is "el."

Obviously there are many other countries with abbreviations based on English and there's some decision-making related to avoiding conflicts, but it is a little odd. My first guess would be that the ISO country code logic went something like: prefer native names, if they use the Latin alphabet.

"GB" vs "uk"

Isn't the difference that UK includes Northern Ireland? So it's more of a difference than just using a different word for the same thing.

Indeed, Great Britain is the island containing England, Wales, and Scotland, and the UK is Great Britain plus Northern Ireland.

But GB is the ISO 3166 code for the UK, including Northern Ireland. The reason is that the ISO committee wanted to avoid generic words like "united" and "kingdom" so they went for the more "unique" GB, in spite of being somewhat politically sensitive, confusing, and inconsistent with some other standards and every-day usage.

Great Britain is the largest island in the British Isles. There are quite a few[1] smaller ones. Great Britain contains parts of England, Scotland, and Wales. The isle of Ireland is the second largest (and second most populous) and contains parts of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK) contains the countries England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The British Isles also contain the Isle of Man, Gurnsey, and Jersey which are not part of any of the countries in the UK, but are instead Crown Dependencies[2]. Those are neither sovereign states nor members of the UK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_the_British... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Dependencies

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