"mis" update review request

[John Cowan]

Mark Davis scripsit:

> You might like this to be true, but I don't see any substantiation of
> it in the standard. If you could point me to that, I'd appreciate it.

It seems rather self-evident to me that 'ber' is a subset of 'afa',
and so on; but no, the standard doesn't say so.  It does, however, say:

	A collective language code is not intended to be used when an
	individual language code or another more specific collective
	language code is available.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/normtext.html section 4.1.1

I take that to mean that "afa" is unsuitable for a Berber language, and
"ger" is unsuitable for English.  A fortiori, "mis" is unsuitable for
a language for which a better code is available.

Questionless, this contradicts the desire for stability, but I don't
see what's to be done about it.  I tried at one point to get all
language collection codes deprecated, but it was pointed out that
there are good reasons for having them, as when insufficient evidence
is available.

-- 
John Cowan   cowan at ccil.org   http://ccil.org/~cowan
I must confess that I have very little notion of what [s. 4 of the British
Trade Marks Act, 1938] is intended to convey, and particularly the sentence
of 253 words, as I make them, which constitutes sub-section 1.  I doubt if
the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of
equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity. --MacKinnon LJ, 1940