Sign languages (was: Re: additions to ISO 639 and the IANA language subtag registry)

[Michael Everson]

At 17:59 -0800 2006-02-20, Mark Davis wrote:
>I agree with Doug's comments. The use of "sgn-xxx" was never a 
>particularly way of tagging, since it implies that there is some 
>level of shared comprehension between "sgn-xxx" and "sgn-yyy".

Well, it doesn't *have* to. Just because this sort of hierarchy 
applies to spoken languages does not mean that we cannot (for good 
reason) treat Sign Languages differently.

And one way they are different is that a Sign Language's signs may be 
used to represent a spoken language's grammar in a particular way.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com