Duplicate Busters: Survey #1

Frank Ellermann nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de
Fri Aug 1 16:48:44 CEST 2008


Doug Ewell wrote:

> At first I was concerned about their turnaround time

Yes, but you could use a Comment to "announce" expected
changes; and later remove the Comment after it happened.

I'm more concerned about having multiple sources with
slight variations.  In Wikipedia they now try to mirror
the complete 639-3 list.  Divided in 26 sublists (A-Z).

Checking my favourites I could add fy to fry, and maybe
fix the Eastern Frisian word for Frisian to "Seeltersk".

In the edit history I found that somebody had the quite
plausible but wrong idea to rename Silesian to "Polish
Silesian", and Lower Silesian to "German Silesian".  It
was immediately corrected by somebody knowing what it is
about.  But it is a good example how "just add some nice
qualifier" can miss the point and hit a rat-hole.

BTW, one advantage of the Wikipedia list is that it has
the native names (as far as they are known, and editors
agree on what it is, szl is simple, stq is harder), see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639:s>

> ISO 639-3 makes a distinction between the reference and
> non-reference names.  RFC 4646bis does not, although it
> will non-normatively place the ISO 639-3 reference name
> (if any) first within the record.

The 4646bis proponents could decree that it is normative.

Or why not invent a convention to flag "secondary" dupes,
e.g., add (*) to "secondary" dupes.  Including the few
"dupe by macrolanguage" and "dupe by deprecation" cases.

 Frank



More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list