Re: [Ltru] extlang (was: Punjabi)

Gerard Meijssen <gerard dot meijssen at gmail dot com> wrote:

> You can explain that zh is old and Mandarin can be used as zh-cmn and 
> cmn as a consequence. People will opt for cmn if they have the option 
> and to it right, they will still opt for cmn and you would call them 
> wrong.

This continues to be a misrepresentation of the nature and intent of 
macrolanguages.  It is not a question of one being "old" and the other 
being "new."  If it were, the "old" code element would not exist in ISO 
639-3.

The ISO 639-3/RA has determined that for some languages, including 
Chinese and I guess 53 others, it is suitable or common in some 
situations to think of them as a single language and in other situations 
as multiple languages.  That is the decision they have made, based on 
their knowledge and research.  I do not consider it my job, at least, to 
second-guess their knowledge or research about Chinese and declare that 
it is never appropriate to think of Chinese as a single language, nor to 
"bake" (as Mark would say) my opinion into the tagging standard.

--
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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