Appeal to ISO 639 RA in support of Elfdalian

Mats Blakstad mats.gbproject at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 14:02:03 CEST 2016


> > ... that process has been initiated.   ... but that depends on speedy
> action by the 639 RA. ... added to ISO 639 within the next three months (by
> 2016-05-31), to avoid this situation.
>
> I strongly dislike the tone here, which is that of giving an ultimatum.
> More generally, the tone overall is patronizing --- almost Trumpian. The
> 639-3 RA is by far the most important partner relationship for
> ietf-languages, and you should seek to build a stronger relationship with
> more dialog rather than giving ultimata or suggesting that they don't
> understand their job nearly as well as you do.
>

I agree that the overall tone could be more diplomatic, however I don't
agree about that this is an ultimata. It is just to state clearly what are
the consequences of the position that the RA has but both themselves and
IETF in, and to be clear about how it can be solved. I applied for the
subtag 1,5 years ago. As I'm interested to conduct my work using quality
localization data I made the effort to make an application to register the
language properly. The RA rejected the application, but as Elfdalian is not
a variant it would be wrong be registered it as a variant subtag, so the
only proper way to encode it now is therefor using a language subtag -
which I guess is both in the interest of IETF and ISO that will not happen.
I need the code to be able to add Elfdalian website content, add
localization data and help translators get their keyboard right, however I
don't have time to wait for years before there comes a code that I can use,
and from the way the RA handled this application I'm not sure if they will
even ever encode it.

I thought this letter was already sent more than a month ago. I suggest
that we give 2 months, I think it should be enough time for them to
consider if they want to find a pragmatic solution to this issue or not.
Then I can get the code I need to continue my work and make the best out of
it.
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