ON LANGUAGE NAMES /// RE: Results of Duplicate Busters Survey #2//Ainu, Aynu, Ajnu

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Fri Sep 12 14:56:10 CEST 2008


Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> Gérard is suggesting to change the encoding of an entity encoded in 
> ISO 639-3: to change "aib" to "ajn". This would be a destabilizing 
> change that would violate the principles of BCP 47 as well as ISO 
> 639-3, and that serves no useful purpose that I can see. Please see 
> clause 4.5.2 of ISO 639-3:
>
> "To ensure continuity and stability, the identifier for any given 
> language shall not be changed."
>
> This is a complete non-starter.

I agree 100%, and also agree with Michael that talk of "improving" the 
way ISO 639-3/RA assigns code elements and names is getting out of scope 
for this list.

This is not the same as what I proposed in the surveys, which was for us 
(the BCP 47 people) to disambiguate identical Description fields for 
different languages.  The fact that ISO 639-3/RA did the work for us, 
allowing us to solve our problem while remaining name-compatible with 
639-3, is great, but it was not a requirement for the RA to change its 
policies to match our views of how names or code elements should be 
assigned.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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