New item in ISO 639-2 - Zaza

Frank Ellermann nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de
Thu Aug 24 16:35:00 CEST 2006


John Cowan wrote:
 
> Canonicalization is not part of 3066bis, just a
> recommendation.

It's a SHOULD in section 4.4 (a part of 3066bis), with some
MUSTs if you have no compelling reasons to ignore the SHOULD.
Or are you talking about something else ?

> Macrolanguages exist as a shim between the moderate lumper
> tendencies of 639-2 and the extreme splitter tendencies of
> 693-3.  Wherever 639-2 has lumped language varieties that
> 639-3 considers distinct languages, a macrolanguage is 
> created.

Nice explanation, thanks.

> When we do get a case of the first kind, under option #1 we 
> must decide either case by case or once and for all what to 
> do: add the deprecate the new subtag (as we do with changes 
> to country codes, but without a specific replacement), or 
> deprecate the existing language subtags and introduce
> corresponding extlang tags under the new tag.

Who's that "we" in this statement, the subtag list ?  I'd hope
that the business of introducing new macrolanguages or not is
the job of ISO 639, and not a side-effect of 639-2 doing this,
and 639-3 doing that (= nothing, for the part after the "or" in
your scenario).

Unless 639-3 is bound to create this macrolanguage anyway, then
getting it right before it's "official" might be an option.

It never occured to me that 639-2 and 639-3 could get into some
conflicts, Peter always said that such issues will be fixed in
the final version.  And I thought it couldn't happen after that
"date-C" in 2007.

Frank




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