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

+1 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Ewell [mailto:dewell@adelphia.net] 
> Sent: 05 October 2006 07:31
> To: LTRU Working Group
> Subject: [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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