Results of Duplicate Busters Survey #2

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Sun Sep 7 18:00:28 CEST 2008


On 7 Sep 2008, at 01:18, Peter Constable wrote:
>> Frank Ellerman wrote:
>> IMO decreeing that RFC 4646 and older tags are obsoleted
>> by whatever ISO 639-3 says is no option.  There will be
>> applications limiting themselves to RFC 4646 languages,
>> all ISO 639-1/2 warts included.  Interpreting such tags
>> as defined in ISO 639-3 can result in unclear gibberish.
>
> Alpha-3 language IDs that are in ISO 639-2 and the alpha-3  
> counterparts to alpha-2 IDs in ISO 639-1 represent the same  
> semantics in ISO 639-3 as the items in ISO 639-1/-2.

I've heard enough, thank you all. My ruling (because Doug asked me to  
rule on this) is that the ISO 639-3 field should be sufficient. We do  
not need to repeat ISO 639-2 fields and we do not need to repeat ISO  
639-1 fields. 639-3 is a proper superset, and is more accurate than  
the others.

If anyone wants to make this all tidier, they should talk to the 639  
Registration Authorities and ask them to harmonize their fields. It is  
not our job to do that here.

Doug, make it so.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

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