New item in ISO 639-2 - Zaza

[Frank Ellermann]

John Cowan wrote:

> Currently we have no such facility in the registry and no
> provision for it in the matching draft.

Mark's plan should work under the conditions of your example.

Not generally, if "zh-ang" would be introduced it must not
match "ang".  There won't be a "pref"-pointer from "ang" to
"zh-ang", they don't match.

In your example the various Ryukyu tags get a pointer to the
new "rkn", an algorithm can then determine that these tags
belong to the same macrolanguage.

If "rkn" is first introduced as ordinary tag, then it could
be registered independent of the older Ryukyu tags, they'd
coexist for some days / weeks.

Then 639-3 identifies "rkn" as macrolanguage, therefore it
will be deprecated, and the old tags get pointers to their
new stem.  Folks can then use "rkn" alone (deprecated), or
"rkn-ex1" (deprecated), or "ex1" alone (as before).

> History.  The tag "zh" has been around a long time

Yes, that's an important difference from the "rkn" example.

We'd need a rule in 3066ter, that new 639-2 tags identified
as macrolanguage shortly afterwards will be deprecated in
the registry.

Frank