Adding variant subtags 'aluku' and 'nduyka' and 'pamaka' fordialects

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Fri Aug 21 12:20:30 CEST 2009


If they Aluku is not a variety of Ndyuka, then it seems to me that it  
is more appropriate to ask for an ISO 639-3 tag.

On 21 Aug 2009, at 10:35, Pascal Vaillant wrote:

> At present, we need the three tags for digital corpora, and we feel  
> (after
> due discussion with colleagues who are specialists of the said  
> dialects),
> that the situation is best solved by adding three variant subtags in  
> the
> IANA registry, rather than by trying to register Aluku and Pamaka as  
> separate
> language entries in ISO-639-3. As a matter of fact, the degree of
> similarity/divergence is best described at the language/dialect level
> than at the metalanguage/language level (judging by comparisons with
> other attested examples). So we can put up with the slight, temporary,
> inaccuracy of saying that "Aluku [resp. Ndyuka] is a dialect of Busi  
> Nenge
> Tongo [djk]", when a lookup in ISO-639-3 at the present time yields
> "djk = Aukan/Nduka", but it is not a good solution to the problem to
> say that "Aluku is a dialect of Ndyuka". By the way, this would lead  
> us
> to state, symmetrically, that "Ndyuka is a dialect of Ndyuka".

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



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