ISO 639 name change: Songhai languages

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Tue Jan 9 02:09:13 CET 2007


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Don Osborn

> So, to say a Keyman keyboard like the AFRO one is appropriate for the
> Fulfulde of Western Niger (fuh) is not really accurate or helpful. Anything
> that is good for the west is good for the east (fuq) and you'd be better off
> referring to just Fula macrolanguage (a locale would be ff-NE). And as far
> as keyboards for that language go, they would probably cover several country
> locales, but that is getting offtopic again...

A problem for a small company like Tavultesoft is that they have no way to ?know up front when a category from ISO 639 will capture the right distinctions and ?when it won't. They just don't have the resources to gather all the necessary info and process it. And so, a very easy solution for them -- albeit one that makes some ?compromises -- is to simply adopt a comprehensive coding set like 639-3 and ?assume it's good enough for the given application. In such a case, maybe it is good ?enough, and maybe it isn't.



Peter Constable?


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