Criteria for languages?
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Tue Dec 1 18:54:05 CET 2009
On 1 Dec 2009, at 17:02, Peter Constable wrote:
> There is clear evidence on the coding issue: MARC has used "lav" for
> Latgalian for some time.
No different from someone using "ger" to include Bavarian or Swiss.
> If the denotation of "lav" were changed to explicitly exclude
> Latgalian (which would be necessary if its scope is not set to
> macrolanguage), then an unknown number of librarians will have
> broken data. It would be irresponsible of the ISO 639-RA/JAC to do
> such a thing, IMO.
I do not believe that, erm, some "Lettish" is a "macrolanguage"
including Latvian and Latgalian.
If librarians tagged some Latgalian data with "the nearest thing" that
still does not mean that all Latvian-language data is broken. If "lav"
becomes a macrolanguage then to be precise all Latvian books will have
to be re-tagged.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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