Unilingua

[Doug Ewell]

We have registered tags for Boontling, Enochian, Mingo, and Scouse.

In LTRU we are discussing, very seriously and purposefully, adding
support for ISO 639-3 in the future, which would add the next 6,700
languages and 350 "extended languages" that WEREN'T used widely enough
to justify an ISO 639-2 code element.

We're also talking, at least peripherally, about supporting ISO 639-6 in
a still-later version.  That could add as many as 13,000 more codes for
almost every imaginable dialect and spoken or written variation.

If registering one more constructed-language tag is going to cause
problems of scale, we'd better rethink some of those other plans.

(BTW, it would have to be "x-uniling" or some such, due to length
constraints.)

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tex Texin" <tex at xencraft.com>
To: "Doug Ewell" <dewell at adelphia.net>
Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 0:20
Subject: Re: Unilingua


> Doug,
>
> (I am replying to your mail, but it is not directed at you
> personally.)
>
> Why do we want to register things that have no practical use or
> significance, for which there are almost no documents to give the tag
> to, and yet make our software tables larger and require more time to
> explain what it represents than the value of recognizing the code?
>
> Isn't it ok to have some number of documents for which we say, yes the
> contents are in a language which isn't covered by tags, so if you want
> a description it needs to be annotated in some other way.
>
> If somebody has a unilingua text they can label it with x-unilingua
> and note somewhere what it represents.
>
> We should reel the registry back into being something that internet
> engineers need for practical internet applications and have some form
> of 80/20 rule related to language categorization. I recognize the
> needs of linguists to distinguish languages with subtle but important
> differences, but I don't see that general software or internet
> applications should be burdened with the overhead. This has all got to
> fit in my watch someday. The registry should not be a museum for every
> possible variant that ever existed or was postulated. Maybe in
> addition to 50 documents to register a tag we should require there be
> 50 engineers that testify they care to recognize the distinction.
> (kidding, but only slightly...)
>
> tex