Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

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Dear John, Hugh, all,

 

complementing what Janell and other have answered, also before, formally, the Ethnologue FOLLOWED the ISO 639-3 updates, although the two processes were difficult to distinguish, which was one of the reasons to revise ISO 639 in the first place.

 

Here are the Terms of Reference for the new Maintenance Agency: https://standards.iso.org/iso/639/ed-2/en/.  There is also a workflow for the processing of change requests.  In the deliberation phase, the members of the MA board can and should consult with experts, whose responses should be publicly available, but, answering Hugh’s question,  there is no central expert mailing list such as here at IANA/IETF.  Still, this seems better to me than the previous procedure, where the ISO 639-3 registrar asked undisclosed experts and decided basically alone, which was a critique I heard many times among colleagues.  (Usually, only cases involving the former Parts 1 and 2 were brought to the earlier JAC.)

 

Here is a graphic with the different subsets of the ISO 639 identifiers, corresponding to the earlier Parts 1-3 and 5 of ISO 639, and with links to the still separate databases (which should eventually be unified into a single source file/database with different views on the respective sites). https://standards.iso.org/iso/639/ed-2/en/Access%20to%20the%20databases%20of%20the%20ISO%20639%20Language%20Code.pdf  This graphic can be accessed at https://www.iso.org/iso-639-language-code

 

(I know it is confusing, also for me, that there are two ISO pages for ISO 639, https://www.iso.org/iso-639-language-code and https://standards.iso.org/iso/639/ed-2/en/.  I have already proposed that there are at least links from one page to the other.)

 

I hope this answers most questions that members of this list may have.  Otherwise Janell (I am sure) and myself are certainly willing to answer more questions.

 

Best, Sebastian

 

 

 

From: Ietf-languages <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Registrar ISO639-3
Sent: Thursday, 30 November, 2023 16:39
To: John Cowan <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]; Hugh Paterson III <[e-mail]>; Doug Ewell <[e-mail]>; IETF Languages Discussion <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Latin Sub tags

 

Dear John,

 

The previous ISO change request cycle for 639-3 has been replaced by the more frequent cycle of the ISO639 Maintenance Agency as of the publication of ISO639:2023 earlier this month.  Once the MA has considered and decided on requests, they will be published.  The newsletter that will publish the requests for comment and the decisions should start up in 2024 and be released on a quarterly basis. Since the 639 revision, the changes are still being implemented so I don't have a definite date.  This will replace the usual update that would have been released in January 2024 by the 639-3 RA under the previous 639-3 standard, 

 

Kind regards,

 

Janell Nordmoe

ISO639-3 Registrar

 

On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 12:16 PM John Cowan < <mailto:[e-mail]> [e-mail]> wrote:

(I apologize for my previous null reply.)

 

On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 12:43 PM < <mailto:[e-mail]> [e-mail]> wrote:

 

 

just this month, the setting for ISO 639 has changed.  The earlier independently managed parts are now understood to belong to ONE code, the identifiers of the elements of which may belong to different SETS which correspond to the earlier PARTS 1 to 5.

 

This is excellent news.  I see that the Wikipedia article has already been updated.

 

So from now on, any changes to ISO 639 are presumably better coordinated, as any new requests (most are expected to come in via the earlier registrar of Part 3) will be considered right away as concerning the code as a whole, and then the consequences for possible needs to update different subsets of the identifiers will be considered simultaneously.

 

This is not very clear.  Does it mean, for example, that the existing Ethnologue annual approval cycle will continue, and only then will the resulting code changes be propagated to the various sets of ISO 639?  Or is the intention to speed up the approval process altogether?  Please help us understand this.

 

If you (or anybody else here) need further clarification about this, I am willing to answer this off-list, in order not to spam this list with ISO questions.

 

Although there is not and cannot be a formal relationship between this list and any ISO organization. I believe the members of this list would agree that this discussion is on-topic and indeed highly relevant to this list and would not be classified as spam even in the widest sense of that term, which is why I am sending this post to the list.

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-- 

Janell Nordmoe

ISO 639-3 RA

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