was RE: additions to ISO 639 and the IANA language subtag
registry
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Mon Feb 20 22:57:47 CET 2006
At 12:10 -0800 2006-02-20, Peter Constable wrote:
> > At 19:43 +0000 2006-02-20, Michael Everson wrote:
>> >I have misgivings about how the Signed Languages
>>
>> ... are encoded ...
>>
>> >, in the Ethnologue and in 639.
>
>I've always had strong misgivings about how signed languages were
>getting handled in the IANA registry.
Yes, and I don't think those misgivings were well-founded.
>This doesn't really address the general question I asked, btw.
That may be, but there is a real disconnect between what Ethnologue
and 639 apparently do with Signed Languages and what RFC3066 does.
RFC 3066 registed sgn- as a generic (and non-genetic) indicator of
the type of language (signed not spoken). Then the use of language
tag and geographical tag corresponds to what the languages are
usually called (generally in spoken languages with which the
coexist). This notation is flexible enough to distinguish between
American Sign Language and Signed English (as used in America). The
Ethnologue and 639 give arbitrary three-letter codes for only the
former class. I think this is a poor decision on the part of the
editors of the Ethnologue, and we still have the problem of the
latter class.
But I have said this before, and no one seemed to take me seriously.
So now we have an RFCbis which probably doesn't help the Deaf
community very well. Particularly as no one probably discussed this
issue with Deaf community leaders like Valerie Sutton, who actually
use the codes.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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