Europanto

[Peter Constable]

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


> > I'm guessing the source of this was Linguist List -- Ethnologue staff
> > focuses on modern, living languages, and they rely on Linguist List
> to
> > catalog historic/archaic and constructed languages.
> >
> > http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/get-language-code-action.cfm
>
> But Michael did spot it on Ethnologue:
>
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eur

It's not entirely clear where it originated. The 639-3 RA tells me that it was in the draft code tables (I confirmed it was in the very first working draft) because it was in Ethnologue 14 (which I've also confirmed). But Ethnologue doesn't generally catalogue constructed languages. The Ethnologue Editor replied to my inquiry indicating that he intends to remove all constructed languages except in case there is evidence of a significant population of people using one as a first language.

Regardless of how it originated, it's apparent that it was in the draft code table for 639-3 from the beginning -- that's since 2002 -- and nobody commented on it. And it's apparent that it's not something we would have coded in retrospect if we were careful. Well, in a very large code set, I'm not at all surprised to find there's a bit of junk, and it's easy enough for us to take care of it: we just deprecate it. It's hardly reason to reject 4646bis, as Frank has suggested.

Compare this with Unicode / ISO 10646: there are characters like U+0953 that are 100% junk. But it would be utter folly to have vetoed these on account of such a glitch.



Peter