[Ltru] Re: "mis" update review request

[John Cowan]

Mark Davis scripsit:

>   3. The way to make an collection code XXX not unstable is to make it
>   not be not defined as an exclusion: removing the (Other). [your proposal]
>   4. Then XXX is stable into the future, since adding a new language of
>   the type XXX doesn't affect it.
>   5. Thus if we change "bat" from Baltic (Other)" into "Baltic", meaning
>   any of the Baltic languages, it becomes stable.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, this simply isn't true.  If scholars decide that
language X is not a Baltic language after all, then the denotation of "bat"
changes whether we like it or not.

Granted, this isn't likely to happen with Baltic, but a lot of the other
language families aren't so well understood.  Short of defining each
collection by extension, which no one has undertaken to do (the
Ethnologue 14th edition is halfway there), no blanket stability
guarantees can be offered.

> However, if that is too big a step to stomach, the alternative is to
> strongly recommend that people never use "mis", and propose a new code for
> ISO 639-2 that has the meaning of "Any language".

That suits me much better.

-- 
John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
The whole of Gaul is quartered into three halves.
        -- Julius Caesar