[Ltru] Re: "X" vs. 'X (macrolanguage)"

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> It's going to be confusing no matter what we do
>
> Confusing is one thing, but two different language
> codes with the same description would be *broken*.

Of course, at least one of the subtags would have to have the 
description with parenthetical comment (individual/macro, or region).  I 
never suggested that two subtags would have the exact same description. 
Indeed, that was a big point I raised months ago over "ASCII 
transliterations": there are certain "minimal pairs" that become 
identical if you remove diacritics.

> Seriously, who lies about "sw", the registry or
> SIL ?  Did we miss a bulk update of 639-1 codes ?
> I know that we talked about info in parentheses,
> but not this "Swahili" ambiguity, or did we ?

639-1 and 639-2 do not have this type of parenthetical information, 
because for them there are no macrolanguages, no regional language-name 
colisions, and no ambiguity.

We did have this discussion before.  The reason it comes up again is 
that, now that my attention has been called to the "no inverted names" 
rule in 4646bis, it became clear that some of the 639-2 inverted names 
like "Greek, Modern (1453-)" would be removed.  As long as that is the 
case, I wanted to know if "Ainu" and "Ainu (Japan)" both have to be 
retained, and if "Swahili" and "Swahili (macrolanguage)" both have to be 
retained, because the only purpose for keeping all of them is to have 
both 639-2 and 639-3 names, which is no longer guaranteed anyway.

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

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