1. I think we have to be very careful here. The meaning of a standard like ISO 639-2 is established not by <span style="font-style: italic;">what we wish it would have said, </span>nor by <span style="font-style: italic;">
what we would find out if we were able to read Peter's mind</span><span style="font-style: italic;">.</span> It is established by the wording in the standard, and how reasonable people could interpret it. The fact that "mis" was incorporated in order to account for MARC codes is interesting, but is not in the text of the standard. We can't expect users of BCP 47 to all be able to read Peter's mind before tagging.
<br><br>2. When we are looking at stability, that is very important: our goal is that once content is correctly tagged, people can depend on the fact that we will not change the meaning of a tag out from under them. So clarifications that we add in future versions of 4646 or the registry are fine, as long as they do not narrow the range of reasonable interpretations. We can broaden them. So in the case of "mis", a proposed narrowing to include just the MARC codes is clearly disallowed, since it was nowhere stated in ISO 639-2 at the time that "mis" was added to the language registry (the BCP 47 semantics are established at the time we add the code). That is one of the key principles of BCP 47, is to isolate us where necessary from instabilities in the source standards.
<br><br>(The one exception we might be able to make is where something is so badly defined that most reasonable people couldn't come up with any consistent definition for it.)<br><br>3. Now, I think there are steps that can be taken to make the above moot. I think Peter's suggestion for ISO 639-X of broadening all of the Collections to remove the (Other) is exactly the right strategy, and if this can be done before 4646bis is issued, all the better. So having
<br><ul><li>aus Australian languages means any of the languages on <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90498">http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90498</a></li><li>bat Baltic (Other) => Baltic languages, means any of the languages on
<a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90207">http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90207</a></li><li>mis Miscellaneous languages, essentially the root for <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/family_index.asp">
http://www.ethnologue.com/family_index.asp</a></li></ul>and so on. This is useful on a number of levels; it resolves a number of problems in the interpretation of language codes, and makes the source standards themselves more stable. (In the ideal case, we would have codes for each of the possible "decision points" in the language tree. That is, if we look at any language code such as
<a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/show_lang_family.asp?code=eng">http://www.ethnologue.com/show_lang_family.asp?code=eng</a> we'd have codes for each of the parent groupings, not just some of them, like "Australian languages".)
<br><br>3. Randy raised the issue as to whether "mis" in the broad sense is useful (as something that has linguistic content, but I don't know what it is). It very much follows the model in #3. There are times when detection can only determine that it looks like there is some linguistic content -- it is not just binary data -- but current detection can't really determine what it might be. That is, a code that means "according to our best available detection methods this doesn't look like it is zxx".
<br><br>4. I'm leery of using zxx for programming languages, instead of just binary. There is clearly some linguistic content in "if (content == null) { /* remove the item in the lookup table */ ...}". Maybe we need another code for this, something different than either 'art' or 'zxx'.
<br><br>Mark<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/14/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Peter Constable</b> <<a href="mailto:petercon@microsoft.com">petercon@microsoft.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
From: Randy Presuhn [mailto:<a href="mailto:randy_presuhn@mindspring.com">randy_presuhn@mindspring.com</a>]<br><br><br>> I find it very hard to believe that a reasonable analysis<br>> (whether done by human or machine) would classify a text a
<br>> being "mis" without being able to recognize which of the<br>> languages in that grouping the text belonged to. I can<br>> believe someone could look at text and say "it's a slavic<br>> language, but I'm not sure which one." Do we really think
<br>> someone or something would look at some text and say "it's<br>> Ainu, Andamanese, or Etruscan, but I can't tell which, so<br>> I'll tag it 'mis'"?<br><br>If someone were so tempted, I would argue that would be inappropriate use of mis. Since they do not know what it is, their declaration is that the language identity is not determined, and the appropriate tag for that is und. Appropriate use of mis does not require that one know the language of the content; it does, however, require that one know it is *not* a language covered by any of the available tags.
<br><br><br><br>Peter<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Ltru mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ltru@ietf.org">Ltru@ietf.org</a><br><a href="https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru">https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Mark