Questions on ISO 639-3.

Mark Davis mark at macchiato.com
Fri Nov 21 20:28:47 CET 2008


I have a couple of questions about ISO 639-3 (and the Ethnologue) that
I'm hoping someone here can answer or forward.

1. Is there an oversight with Akan?

http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=aka

shows Akan as a Macrolanguage, but has a Denotation that points to the
Ethnologue, where it is treated as if it were an individual language.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=aka

This seems incorrect, and is also not the case for a few other
Macrolanguages that I sampled, including nor, hbs, zho (no, sh, zh).


2. This is more of a request; it would be quite handy if the web
queries (both for ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue) also took the BCP 47
forms, eg.

http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ar
worked just like:
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ara

It would be handier for other sites to link in that way, using the
standard BCP 47 code.


3. Now that ISO 639-5 is out, are there any plans to update the
Language Family Index, so as to add the new codes that were missing?

Eg, so that we'd see on http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017

Indo-European (ine)
  Albanian (sqj)
...
  Baltic (bat)
...
  Germanic (gem)
...
The table in ISO 639-3 of the language families is interesting (eg ine
: gem : gmw), but (a) incomplete, since it doesn't actually include
the elements of gmw, and (b) not machine readable (grrrh).

Mark


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