Nepali Extension Language Question (WAS: Review period; Nepali and Oriya)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Tue Aug 7 18:46:30 CEST 2012


CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

>> I'm not arguing for or against putting Nepali and Oriya into the
>> extlang category, but I do want to call attention to the fact that
>> this can ONLY be done now, at the time the encompassed languages are
>> registered. They cannot be registered as extlangs later. (So says
>> Section 3.3, item 12.C.4.)
>
> This is a case then for registering them.

No, it's only a case that IF we are going to register the extlangs, we
can only do it at the same time we register the primary language
subtags. It says nothing about whether Nepali and/or Oriya meet the
criteria.

> However, according to the information at the change request for
> Nepali, "http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/cr_files/2011-158.pdf
> ...

Perhaps in the future, I should add the Change Request number to each
registration form, so reviewers can more easily find these pages.

> Based on this information, unless we find anything counter to this,
> then perhaps the languages Nepali [npi] and Dotyali[dpy] [recte:
> [dty]] should not be registered as extension languages [recte:
> "extended language subtags"] for the macrolanguage [nep].

I agree that, based on the quoted sections from the change request, it
seems unlikely that speakers or authors of Dotyali would have used the
BCP 47 subtag 'ne' to identify Dotyali content, and that consequently
the extlangs probably are not appropriate.

Oriya may not be as clear. The change request to add Sambalpuri
(2011-159_spv.pdf) says that "The Ethnologue classifies Sambalpuri as a
dialect of Oriya called Western Oriya." However, the request to create
the macrolanguage (2011-159.pdf) mostly emphasizes the differences
between Oriya and Sambalpuri, and in fact gives no rationale for the
macrolanguage (item 2.b). Note that the Nepali macrolanguage request
also gave no rationale.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­



More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list