Subject: [Ltru] Re: "X" vs. 'X (macrolanguage)"

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 12:34:03 -0800

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> It's going to be confusing no matter what we do
>
> Confusing is one thing, but two different language
> codes with the same description would be *broken*.

Of course, at least one of the subtags would have to have the 
description with parenthetical comment (individual/macro, or region).  I 
never suggested that two subtags would have the exact same description. 
Indeed, that was a big point I raised months ago over "ASCII 
transliterations": there are certain "minimal pairs" that become 
identical if you remove diacritics.

> Seriously, who lies about "sw", the registry or
> SIL ?  Did we miss a bulk update of 639-1 codes ?
> I know that we talked about info in parentheses,
> but not this "Swahili" ambiguity, or did we ?

639-1 and 639-2 do not have this type of parenthetical information, 
because for them there are no macrolanguages, no regional language-name 
colisions, and no ambiguity.

We did have this discussion before.  The reason it comes up again is 
that, now that my attention has been called to the "no inverted names" 
rule in 4646bis, it became clear that some of the 639-2 inverted names 
like "Greek, Modern (1453-)" would be removed.  As long as that is the 
case, I wanted to know if "Ainu" and "Ainu (Japan)" both have to be 
retained, and if "Swahili" and "Swahili (macrolanguage)" both have to be 
retained, because the only purpose for keeping all of them is to have 
both 639-2 and 639-3 names, which is no longer guaranteed anyway.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://home.roadrunner.com/~dewell
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

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From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 22:09:19 +0100

Doug Ewell wrote:

> 639-1 and 639-2 do not have this type of parenthetical information

Peter or John (or both) said that this will be coordinated for all
parts of ISO 639, and I made sure to select "639-1" on the Web form
where I got "Swahili (macrolanguage)" for "sw".  Is there another
source for this stuff ?  I trashed my old 639-2 bookmark in favour
of 639-3.

> I wanted to know if "Ainu" and "Ainu (Japan)" both have to be 
> retained

At least the latter has to be kept, otherwise you get a collison.

> if "Swahili" and "Swahili (macrolanguage)" both have to be
> retained

Or "Swahili (individual language)", only a collision won't fly.

No collision at all would be better.  Maybe it has to be decided
case by case, using the unqualified description for the "better"
code, sometimes the "(individual language)" might be "worse" (?)

 Frank