Re: [Ltru] Re: Punjabi

Don Osborn <dzo at bisharat dot net> wrote:

> I also concur with Mark's unease with "baking" in a certain approach, 
> given the potential alternative needs. I would say "flexibility" here 
> but that got me into trouble before.

If the proposal is to allow both "zh-cmn" and "cmn" as synonyms, with 
neither deprecated in favor of the other, then I will indeed object to 
that kind of "flexibility."  The current thinking seems to be that 
matching algorithms will be too dumb to perform anything but basic 
remove-from-right truncation, which would fail dismally under such a 
plan.

> In effect cmn would "map" to zh?

Yes, via the Prefix field.

> I wonder if the existence of the codes doesn't pretty much guarantee 
> that some people will, for whatever reason, use the language code 
> without attention to the macrolanguage code. One would have to 
> consider this possibility and provide for it.

"cmn" would be listed as "Type: extlang".  If people misuse the protocol 
to the point of using extended language subtags alone, without their 
prefix, there is probably nothing we can do about it.  This type of 
person will also invent their own subtags, switch the order of subtags 
from what the ABNF specifies, and so forth.

>> My surmise is that macro-languages are a one-time event: "discovery" 
>> of future macro-languages will mostly be prohibited by rule (since 
>> most of the languages will already have codes in the "primary" 
>> position when they become part of a macro-language collection). If my 
>> surmise is correct, we could ban future extlang additions and use the 
>> remainder of that namespace for (well) nefarious purposes.
>
> Don't agree here. I think there are de facto macrolanguages out there 
> without the title that may need new codes and the extlang 
> relationships with other 639-3 or even 639-1/2 coded (sub)languages 
> that those would imply (Runyakitara, Oshiwambo, and Beti are examples 
> of possibilities, from my understanding of descriptions). At the very 
> least, the door should not be closed.

I think Addison was talking about the combination of (a) ISO 639-3 
adding new macrolanguage relationships with languages that are not 
currently encoded, and (b) our group sticking to its rule about adding 
extlangs.  If we change our rules and allow extlangs to mean something 
other than what they mean in draft-4646bis-02, then anything can happen.

--
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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