[Ltru] Re: Macrolanguages, countries & orthographies

[David Starner]

On 2/13/07, Debbie Garside <debbie at ictmarketing.co.uk> wrote:
> My personal opinion is that ISO 639-3 subtags cover the "whole language" as
> described; all of the language, every part of the language, written and
> spoken and... historical.  Even when there is an ISO 639-3 historical subtag
> that covers part of it.

As a user of en, enm and ang, I don't like that one bit. fr and en are
more mutually intelligible then ang and en, and I don't see any use in
labelling ang as en. Furthermore, if ang can validly be labeled en, it
can also be validly labeled sco, adding another layer of complexity.
Can la really be tagged as any Romance language? Can dum (Middle
Dutch) be tagged as af (Afrikaans)? Can 17th century Dutch be tagged
as af (Afrikaans)?

> Inform proposers of such variants
> that ISO 639-6 is currently being designed and if the need is not urgent
> delay until ISO 639-6 is published.

It's one thing to wait for ISO 639-3, which is clearly available in a
late draft, but something that is "currently being designed" is not
something I feel it's reasonable to expect people to wait for.