Swiss german, spoken

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin jefsey at jefsey.com
Sat Jun 11 02:04:48 CEST 2005


At 01:01 11/06/2005, Mark Davis wrote:
>Latin American Spanish is in a similar boat. Once 3066bis passes (which is
>looking quite likely these days), then there is a mechanism for doing that,
>so ideally we'd wait until then.

quite likely? Would you have mended it not to claim being BCP 47? Would you 
have taken care of ISO 12629 and 11179 details? Did you accept to support 
spoken and sign languages?

Mike,
Karen has a serious non pure XML need for a spoken media oriented 
professional use. Your Draft does not proceed from that kind of need: SIL 
and Unicode are not in pictures but in books. There is no shame in having a 
problem addressing it. But it shows you why we cannot accept your Draft as 
a BCP 47 and why RFC 3066 is from an old time when the Internet was 
primarily a script-oriented medium.

1.  I have no comment on what Peter says about ISO 693-3 supporting the tag 
for its written part (this is show). But I call his attention on the 
possibility of ISO 639-4 permitting it or not. Today there are enough 
pasted paragraphs from one draft to the other to create serious confusion 
about what he wants to propose and objections/questions enough. There also 
big lacks in the proposition - in particular about intra-ISO consistency. 
Frankly it is not decently possible to know where all this goes. This is 
one of the main reason why IESG cannot engage the Internet into a langtag 
non-experimental BCP until all this has stabilised.

2. Michael, why not to consider that for the time being this kind of 
registration is accepted for the Internet (Karen has an obvious 
Internet/IANA need, Internet is not ISO and this is why the registry is 
here: to give time to ISO and Internet to get in tune) but under ISO 639-5. 
Whatever ISO 639-3, -4 and -6 can be, this would be probably acceptable to 
most? I think there is no problem in that conservative way.

3. I agree with Addison: this registration _cannot_ be performed in using 
your Draft because Karen has not attempted to register it with ISO before. 
I note that if you register Spoken Swiss German I will register the Signs 
version which has the same printed side  (One of my neigbhours and good 
friend is an old Swiss lady whose village is near Vaduz  with an academic 
back-ground).This would permit to analyse on a real case if there is a 
possible convergence or not.

This is an interesting issue because it shows some of the practical 
problems the Draft does not address (yet?) while it wants to be a BCP 47.
jfc



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