RE: [Ltru] Is 639-3 bogus ?

In ISO 639-3 terms "collection" is a scope, not a type.

_Scope_ refers to how broad is the range of linguistic varieties encompassed in the denotation of an ID, with four possible values considered in 639-3: individual language, macrolanguage, collection and special purpose. (A fifth value, dialect, might be relevant to another part of ISO 639.) The scope attribute is a normative attribute in ISO 639-3.

_Type_ refers to the currency and genetic nature of the language: living, (recently) extinct, historic (precursor of a modern language), ancient (went extinct in non-recent past), constructed. Entries with a special-purpose scope do not have a type value. Type is an informative attribute.

The scope attribute is directly relevant to the LSR if (i) macro-language scope of an ID is relevant for contructing tags with extlang subtags, and if (ii) use if collection or special-purpose IDs is in any way discouraged.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Addison Phillips [mailto:addison@yahoo-inc.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 12:36 PM
To: John Cowan
Cc: ltru@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Is 639-3 bogus ?

John Cowan wrote:
> Addison Phillips scripsit:
> 
>> I was hoping that 639-3 would provide the information on what is 
>> or is not considered a macro-language. But this information isn't 
>> it.
> 
> "Scope" means "individual language or macrolanguage".  You can
> deduce from the registry which are which; a macrolanguage is one
> that appears as the Prefix of some extlangs.

What I was looking for was:

   http://www.sil.org/iso639%2D3/macrolanguages.asp

And:

   http://www.sil.org/iso639%2D3/scope.asp#M

Ideally, extended language subtags would be restricted to the list in 
the first link above and 4646bis would reflect that fact. I don't want 
to construct that list from the registry: I would prefer something much 
more cut-and-dried, i.e. getting it from ISO 639-3.

I can see at least one problem with the macro languages list: there are 
at least some languages (the "Serbo-Croatian" family) that will be 
grandfathered into language subtags rather than extlangs.

Now, all that said, I think it would be useful to include a "type" field 
for "collective" languages (with the warnings about their suitability 
proposed by John) and for "macro" languages (defining what can be used 
as a prefix value in an extlang).

However, I can also see that this information does not necessarily need 
to occur in the registry.

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

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