Re: [Ltru] Macrolanguage, Extlang. The Sami language situation as example

Peter Constable scripsit:

> Well, what I find striking is that the *only* cases involving
> macrolanguages that are getting discussed are:

[snipped Chinese, Norwegian, Arabic, African languages]

You and I, at least, have also discussed the various macrolanguages in
Figure 8, the "Big Blue and the N dwarfs" cases.

The list has also talked of "sgn" extensively in the past: although it
is not a 639-3 macrolanguage, the plan was to treat it as one.

> So, there is really *only* one case that people seem to care about
> (at least, in the near term -- who knows what may happen with Bikol
> or Zapotec in the future) and that would really be impacted by our
> current decision, and that's Chinese.

Certainly, deprecating "zh-*" and "sgn-*" would have the greatest impact
on backward compatibility, although in both cases the exact details
of the whole tag would differ:  from "zh-xiang" to "zh-hsn", and from
"sgn-US" to the structurally different "sgn-ase".

> (As much as people don't want to cherry pick arbitrarily, it seems to
> me that there is an elephant in this room that we're trying to say is
> no different from the rest of the furniture.)

It's not, unless you are in the kitchen or the bathroom.  They are all
stator machines whose main function is to resist gravity.  (See the
Heinlein story "Waldo, Inc.")

-- 
John Cowan  cowan@ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad
moving hill.  Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes,
but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him
does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are
but memories of his girth and his majesty.  --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"
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