Validity

Mark Davis ☕ mark at macchiato.com
Wed Jan 22 12:57:13 CET 2014


> But both subtags would still remain, and the extlang would still have a Prefix and Preferred-Value of 'ms' (the Prefix MUST NOT be removed -- 3.4).

Let's take a look at those cases.

Type: language
Subtag: jak
Description: Jakun
Added: 2009-07-29
Macrolanguage: ms

Type: language
Subtag: ms
Description: Malay (macrolanguage)
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Latn
Scope: macrolanguage

Type: extlang
Subtag: jak
Description: Jakun
Added: 2009-07-29
Preferred-Value: jak
Prefix: ms
Macrolanguage: ms

You're correct: ms-jak would continue to work in the future; it would not
be unstable. I'd been remembering the first record; the Macrolanguage can
change arbitrarily.

(BTW, for Unicode language/locale codes this is moot, since they are always
move extlangs to the base language position, as per the BCP47
canonicalization.)


Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*


On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Mark Davis ☕ <mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:
>
> > By "unstable", I mean that a tag valid in version V becomes invalid
> > in V+1.
>
> I think you're talking about the case where ISO 639-3/RA removes an
> encompassed language from its macrolanguage. However, I believe we would
> still have stability in that case.
>
> Imagine that the RA decided to remove Jakun ('jak') as a member of the
> macrolanguage Malay ('msa', or as we call it, 'ms'). In the Registry,
> the Macrolanguage field for primary and extended language subtags 'jak'
> would be removed, since that field tracks 639-3 exactly. But both
> subtags would still remain, and the extlang would still have a Prefix
> and Preferred-Value of 'ms' (the Prefix MUST NOT be removed -- 3.4). The
> extlang would probably be deprecated, but that does not affect validity
> (3.1.6).
>
> Even if 639-3 withdrew the code element 'jak' entirely -- say, if Jakun
> were determined to be a dialect of Malay, as Ethnologue suggests -- both
> primary and extlang subtags would be deprecated but still valid.
>
> Thus the extlang relationship doesn't really present any more
> instability than that of primary language subtags, and thus the validity
> rules didn't really have to allow mismatched language-extlang pairs to
> defend against instability.
>
> Did we discuss either of these scenarios in LTRU?
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
> http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
>
>
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