Montenegrin

[John Cowan]

Leif Halvard Silli scripsit:

> This is exactly why I said that I and Milos perhaps understood 
> 'macrolanguage' differently from Peter and John - I know that at least 
> Peter took part in coining the term. 

AFAIK Peter devised the term himself, so any use of it is secondary
to his usage, which has become ISO 639-3 usage.
You can see the evolution from his early papers on reconciling ISO 639-2
with the old Ethnologue codes; the earlier papers try to fit all the
639-2 into the straitjacket of individual languages or collections, but
later on macrolanguages are introduced, and the fit becomes much better.

> That said: The general problem perhaps more is that many tend to think 
> that 'macrolanguage' is a term firmly rooted in linguistic theory. For 
> example, the Serbo-Croatian article on Serbo-Croatian language says 
> that "modern linguists" look at Serbo-Croatian as a "living 
> macrolanguage". [1] And as basis for this claim, the article points to 
> SIL. [2] 

That's the problem with single-sourcing.

> What would be useful was an article that listed all macrolanguages and 
> explained why each of them was considered as such by ISO 639-3.

Peter's detailed discussion of ISO 639-2 issues is at
http://tinyurl.com/3xs6u2f (PDF on scripts.sil.org site).  That document
is obsolete, but still contains lots of useful information.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.  --Edsger Dijkstra