possible additions

[Peter_Constable@sil.org]

On 05/03/2002 08:54:50 AM "Pavla &OR Francis Frazier" wrote:

>Dear IETF Language list serve group...

Pavla has begun attempting something I have held back from doing for the
past two years: mass registrations. I suspected this was bound to happen
sooner or later.

What Pavla hasn't done is assembled each request in the necessary format
specified by RFC 3066, but we have had the means to do that with
bibliographic references to documents for 1000+ languages for some time
(and 6000+ languages with or without bibliographic references), and I think
one or two others here have similarly assembled the pieces necessary to
generate mass requests if it became apparent that that was going to be the
best way forward.

I see this mainly as a test of the willingness and ability of ISO to move
forward quickly with extension of the ISO 639 family of languages.

One side note for Pavla: I haven't looked over your list in any detail, but
I notice that you made reference to the collective codes in ISO 639-2. In a
paper I co-authored with Gary Simons, we did a careful examination of each
of the entries in the ISO 639-1 / -2 sets, and came to the conclusion that
there are a number of codes that represent collections but which are
presented as though they represent individual languages (i.e. they don't
have "languages" or "(other) as part of the associated name). You may want
to review our analysis. See http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/ for details.
The actual analysis is at http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/analysis.asp,
and the paper describing our methodology is at
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/An_analysis_of_ISO_639.pdf.



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>