[Ltru] Re: Proposal: include new "Language-Type:" field

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> The 4646bis registry should capture the language type information from 
> ISO 639-3.  Each language, including macrolanguages, is labeled in -3 
> as either living, extinct, ancient, historic, or constructed.  These 
> terms are defined precisely at http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/types.asp . 
> Though informative rather than normative, this is very useful to help 
> shrink the large number of languages to a more manageable size.

I support this proposal of John's.  I don't agree that it makes the 
Registry into a "kitchen sink" compendium of irrelevant information --  
it is directly related to tagging.

We have text in Section 4.1 of 4646bis that tells users not to use 
"subtags for language collections," but those are not clearly defined 
anywhere except by reference to ISO 639 (and by a rather puzzling 
passage involving "xxx" and "yyy", which I guess are space-fillers). 
One of the major reasons for having a Registry was so users would not 
have to go back to the ISO standards to find out what to use and what 
not to use.

Likewise, instead of having separate notes about (not) using "und" and 
"mul", it might make sense to include a broad usage note about type 
"special" and then list the specific cases.  Note that by hard-coding 
"und" and "mul" into 4646 and 4646bis, we have missed talking about 
"zxx", which should have similar usage constraints.

Trying to correlate languages to countries or group them into families 
(beyond what the core standard provides) would be examples of adding 
information that isn't needed for tagging.

It would be easy to add these Language-Type fields to the 4645bis 
Registry based on the 639-3 data -- not to say that should be a 
determining factor in whether we do it.

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

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