ekl - Kol (Bangladesh)

[Gordon P. Hemsley]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
>> It seems to me to not be a good idea to list the bare "Kol" as a
>> secondary description for "Kol (Bangladesh)" simply because of a
>> mistake. It would be unfair to the other languages named "Kol", and
>> would be duplicate information for no useful gain, IMO.
>
> If it weren't in the official ISO 639-3 data file, I would agree that
> leaving plain "Kol" would be, maybe not unfair, but certainly confusing,
> given the existence of "Kol (This)" and "Kol (That)". (Remember that
> this is the situation the Registry is already in; ISO 639-3 is helping
> out here!)
>
> BCP 47 says that Description fields for code elements based on an
> external standard, like primary language subtags, are "initially taken
> from that source standard." The word "initially" is important; it
> doesn't say all of those Description fields must stay in the Registry
> forever, and in fact:
>
> "The source standard's descriptions MAY be edited or modified, either
> prior to insertion or via the registration process, and additional or
> extraneous descriptions omitted or removed."
>
> So we can either withdraw the change to 'ekl' now (which I suggest, for
> simplicity), or we can add "Kol (Bangladesh)" now and revisit the issue
> of deleting "Kol" at a later time.

Well, I'm of the opinion that all ambiguous names in the Registry
(such as "Kol") should be disambiguated somehow. I don't have any
particular preference for how that is done, however; if you want to
deal with separately, that's fine—the question is, is it more
confusing to not take this particular change now?

-- 
Gordon P. Hemsley
me at gphemsley.org
http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/