Message-Id: <6.2.1.2.2.20050703025830.04a12060@pop.online.fr>
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 04:02:50 +0200
To: ltru@ietf.org
From: Jefsey Morfin <jefsey@online.fr>
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Subject: [Ltru] IANA ISO 3166 related Registries
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The fundamental reason I opposed and will continue to oppose the current 
Draft is that it uses the IANA Registry to attach and disseminate worldwide 
a new language attribute concerning national and linguistic communities 
without involving them. This langtag also confuses these communities and 
cultures since it can only discriminate through the generic language code, 
its generic script code, and the code of a country.

What can be conceived for a solitary linguist classifying its library or 
sorting his notes, does not make sense when considering a network, all the 
more when the words being used are not defined, neither as concepts nor as 
the way their are instantiated: what is a language, what is the nature 
descriptive or normative of the langtag, if its for the reader, for the 
author, for the relational exchange? This is not acceptable when these 
langtags will be de facto imposed to languages independently of the laws 
and policies which may identify, define, support them.

The position adopted by the USA concerning the control of the root file 
results in the continuation of the IANA contract and therefore the 
dependance of the considered Registry from the US Government. Under the 
circumstance, AFRAC (whose purpose in life is to provide a proper reference 
system to French people) has concerted with similar projects under 
consideration in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America and Canada. The 
consensus is that every IANA Registry using ISO 3166 codes will be from now 
on deemed representing an US position, unless it is transferred to the 
ICANN IANA zone, on such case the authority should be the GAC. The 
consensus is that generally the US point of view on local culture does bear 
enough weight to be worth the continuation of the effort engaged since 
December. Also it is that priority will be given to the root files and that 
any organisation proposing a distributed IANA copy will support the langtag 
Registry decided by its own Culture Ministry.

It is also agreed that the US position should be read as a support of the 
International Standards simplification (in this case as ISO 11179, ISO 
639-3, ISO 639-4, ISO 639-6, ISO 3166). The consensus is therefore to use 
the ISO tags or built from ISO tables, and to use x-tags. 


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