Retired 639-3 codes
Michael(tm) Smith
mike at w3.org
Mon Dec 14 07:14:49 CET 2009
Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>, 2009-12-13 22:11 -0700:
> Michael(tm) Smith <mike at w3 dot org> wrote:
>
> >> aex Amerax eng
> >> [...]
> >> yib Yinglish eng
> >
> > Well, those are certainly interesting. I wonder how many other cases
> > that list might have in which the preferred value cited is itself an
> > invalid tag.
>
> 'eng' is a perfectly valid code element in ISO 639-3. It is not a valid
> subtag in BCP 47, but John gave us a list of ISO 639-3 code elements,
> not BCP 47 subtags.
OK, understood. I didn't know about that difference. I'm certainly
starting to really appreciate the complexities around all this...
[...]
> > Was "eng" ever valid? Is it in a different class of
> > retirement/deprecation than the "eml" case?
>
> Again, be careful not to confuse ISO 639-3 code elements with BCP 47
> subtags. 'eng' is and has always been a valid ISO 639-3 code element.
> It is not and never will be a valid BCP 47 subtag, because 'en' --
> derived from the ISO 639-1 two-letter code element -- is used instead
> (for reasons that would be both very difficult and very ill-advised to
> try to change). There is no retirement or deprecation involved here.
OK, I see.
I also see now that my thought about trying to use the ISO 639-3
code retirement mappings list[1] to provide suggestions for the
retired codes wouldn't work on its own anyway -- because I'd then
also need to have some other data source to be able to map a
suggested-replacement code element such as "eng" to its equivalent
BCP 47 subtag.
[1] http://www.sil.org/ISO639-3/iso-639-3_Retirements_20090126.tab
So that implementing the (mis)feature I originally had in mind for
the case of reporting on the retired codes is probably just not
worth the trouble, and quite possibly not even a good idea even
were it more easily doable.
--Mike
--
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
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