Tags for Languages

[Håvard Hjulstad]

Just a few comments (or corrections) to the document
"draft-langtag-phillips-davis-00.txt":

ISO 639-1:2002 (published 2002-07-15) replaced ISO 639:1988, which is no
longer a valid International Standard. Apart from the three changes to
ISO639:1988 that were registered in 1989, ISO 639:1988 is a subset of ISO
639-1:2002. The reference to ISO 639:1988 needs to be changed (in clause 8
and some other places).

In clause 2.2 the reference to ISO 639 needs to be changed. Also the
statement that "ISO639 reserves for private use ... 'qaa' through 'qtz'"
should refer to ISO 639-2.

Clause 2.2.2, first paragraph: I don't quite understand the meaning of
"there should be a good faith attempt to register the language with ISO
639". Anyone is free to submit requests to have a language registered, but
no "attempt to register" a language is possible... There is a request form
on the ISO 639 web site
(http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/iso639jac.html). All requests are
considered. But admittedly, there may be requests that are rejected (for
different reasons).

The address of the ISO 639-1 RA is: Infoterm, Aichholzgasse 6/12, AT-1120
Vienna.

The ISO 3166 MA is no longer DIN in Berlin, but ISO Central Secretariat.

Clause 2.3, item 3: There will be no additional differences between the T
table and the B table in ISO 639-2. Since all the differences relate to
languages that do have alpha-2 identifiers in ISO 639-1, item 3 is not
needed at all.

Best regards,
Håvard Hjulstad

-------------------------
Håvard Hjulstad    mailto:havard at hjulstad.com
Chairman ISO/TC37 (Terminology and other language resources)
Convener of ISO/TC37/SC2/WG1 (Language coding)
Acting chairman of ISO 639 RA-JAC
  Solfallsveien 31
  NO-1430  Ås, Norway
  tel: +47 64963684
  fax: +47 64944233
  mob: +47 90145563
  http://www.hjulstad.com/havard/
-------------------------
all outgoing mail is scanned using Norton AntiVirus