[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]
John Cowan
jcowan at reutershealth.com
Wed Apr 9 15:00:09 CEST 2003
Mark Davis scripsit:
> written language ID
> country ID of residence
> country ID of citizenship
> country ID of bank account
> timezone ID
>
> [This is actually the defintion needed by a customer I was talking to just
> yesterday.]
OT remark: I hope the customer knows enough to use real GNU/Olson timezones
and not just UTC offsets, especially if they need to handle anything other
than current times.
> ISO-639 fails miserably as unambiguous specification of written language. I
> realize that the proponents of ISO-639 don't even want it to apply to
> written language.
Au contraire: the requirements for ISO 639 languages are precisely the
existence of written documents in public repositories (prototypically
libraries). ISO 639 is basically a blessing of a MARC standard devised
by the Library of Congress.
> RFC 3066 is somewhat better, but has the problems as discussed on this list.
> As to the issue of whether RFC 3066bis should include SIL codes directly or
> not, technically I don't much care. I suspect it would be slightly cleaner
> if 3066bis just included some ISO standard.
It would, if it weren't for the massive problems with ISO 639 even as a
standard for written languages. There are far too many codes whose precise
referents aren't really well defined.
> A. 3066bis adds script codes, SIL codes
What I favor.
> B. 3066bis adds script codes, ISO adds SIL codes to ISO 639-3, (later)
> 3066bis#2 adds ISO 639-3 codes
That could take a looooong time. 3066ter (that's the jargon) would be
an awful long time coming.
--
A mosquito cried out in his pain, John Cowan
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
The cause of his sorrow http://www.reutershealth.com
Was para-dichloro- jcowan at reutershealth.com
Diphenyltrichloroethane. (aka DDT)
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