Mingo

[Sean Burke]

Hi language taggy folks!  My potentially helpful response about 
i-mingo is after the relevant quoted section from Doug Ewell:

On 04/07/2015 09:48 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> [...]
> Faced with this, it's no wonder that the easiest way out is to treat
> Mingo as a dialect. *But that's not the criterion we should use.* If we
> absolutely have to change the encoding of Mingo, it should be encoded as
> what it is, not what is easiest and quickest for us to push through our
> process.
>
> Note that the existing grandfathered tag doesn't commit to whether Mingo
> is a dialect or a language, although Sean Burke's 2003 registration form
> cites a book called "An Introduction to the Mingo Language."
>
> The real question is whether this really, really has to be changed RIGHT
> NOW. And my response is, no, it doesn't, not at all, not for a
> language/dialect with under 100 speakers.
>
> If we must register a regular subtag to replace "i-mingo", let's let ISO
> 639-3/RA be the experts instead of trying to play that role ourselves.

I'm sorry for responding so late.  The "wheels of change", "traffic on 
the Ventura Freeway", and all that.

I've asked Jordan Lachler-- the Iroquoianist whose book /An 
Introduction to the Mingo Language/ is cited in the i-mingo 
registration-- whether:

1~ ...whether he would think it sensible to having the tag for Mingo 
being something that formally expressed as "see-mingo", or however one 
would express "Mingo, variant/dialect/form of Seneca",

2~ ...and/or whether making that decision sooner(-ish) rather than 
later(-ish) would be sensible.

And I've just now poked him with a note that a response, sooner rather 
than later would be welcome, even given Doug Ewell having pointed out: 
"The real question is whether this really, really has to be changed 
RIGHT NOW."


BTW, thanks to everyone for maintaining this whole general 
language-and-variety tag infrastructure--
Back in the days of RFC 1766, I could wrap my mind around it all, and 
contributed one or two odd phrases to 3066.
And the introduction of three-language codes seemed unproblematic, but 
then script-codes were deployed, and the possible resulting syntaxes 
and semantics of that now became nontrivial, particularly for the very 
fraught issues of differentiating distinct varieties of "Chinese"-- 
and so I ran and ran and never stopped running!


(Although my dim memory does inform me I must have broken stride: I 
got the somehow *last* ISO 639-1 two-letter code!-- Haitian, ht, in 
2003.  But I assure you that that minor achievement is entirely 
eclipsed by my greater personal achievement: having forgotten it. 
Well, I did, until one day I spontaneously decided to look at the 
Haitian Wikipedia-- and I saw the hostname "ht.wikipedia.org" and I 
thought: "that 'ht' is oddly familiar".
So I wonder if I can get a free t-shirt out of that.
Or a gift card, but for vaudou instead of, like, Sears.  Does IETF do 
that?  *I* don't believe in vaudou, but I'm just... asking for a friend.)