ISO 639 - New item approved - N'Ko

[Mark Crispin]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 09:46 -0700 2006-06-09, Mark Crispin wrote:
>> Regardless of which which Unicode character is ultimately selected for the 
>> third glyph in the subject language, the ASCII (and presumably English) 
>> name N'Ko should be registered too.
> There are names which cannot be represented in ASCII. Click languages for 
> instance.

That is more due to a lack of will rather than a technical limitation.

By your argument, we can't name Japanese in ASCII since ASCII lacks the 
Han characters for "sun", "base", and "language".  The fact that we can do 
so is because people with a mindset more towards practicality rather than 
strict linguistic accuracy defined mappings to Latin script.  These 
mappings are quite flawed (especially for Korean) but are nonetheless 
highly useful.

The example of click languages is an excellent argument of why there 
should not only be an ASCII-only form.  But it's not an argument of why 
there should not be an ASCII-only form.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
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