Anomaly in upcoming registry

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Mon Jun 29 22:22:41 CEST 2009


Mark Davis â?? scripsit:

> hbs = sh, yet
> hbs is not Deprecated, and
> sh is Deprecated

It's actually worse than that.  hbs in 639-2 is deprecated ("retired"),
but hbs in 639-3 is not deprecated.

> We could take ISO 639-3 as superseding 639-1 on the issue of deprecation,
> and I think that would be the right thing to do. However, it would be
> cleaner yet if ISO 639-1 were to un-deprecate sh, so that it was consistent
> with ISO 639-3.

For "639-1" read "639-1 and 639-2".  But there's a policy question here:
coding a language in -1 or -2 is a policy decision, not merely a technical
one: it involves an explicit value judgement on which languages are considered
important enough to get -1 codes or membership in the -2 set.  The various RAs
reserve the right, it seems to me, to change their minds about this (as we
reserve the right to ignore it when they remove codes).

-- 
My corporate data's a mess!                     John Cowan
It's all semi-structured, no less.              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    But I'll be carefree                        cowan at ccil.org
    Using XSLT
On an XML DBMS.


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list