"French part" and "Dutch part" (was: Re: Records and registration forms for BQ, CW, SX, AN)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Thu Dec 23 02:24:21 CET 2010


Re: "French part" and "Dutch part" (was: Re: Records and registration 
forms for BQ, CW, SX, AN)Mark Davis 🍏 <mark at macchiato dot com> 
wrote:

> I think the first description should be without any parenthesized 
> part; that is more appropriate for a comment.

What I proposed was two sets (shorter and longer form) of two 
Description fields (one for MF and one for SX).  It hadn't occurred to 
me in this case to have a "first description" and a "second 
description," like this:

*Description: Saint Martin
*Description: Saint Martin (French part)

and I think that would be silly.

Kent Karlsson wrote:

> That would be like having (before 1990) an entry for "Germany" and 
> another for "Deutschland" and then have "West" and "East" as comments 
> on the respective entries.

I didn't get it before, but now I think Kent is right.  The names for MF 
and SX are the same, except one is in French and the other is in Dutch. 
And we do have precedents for non-English Description fields, especially 
since ISO 639-3 likes to list local translations of the names of sign 
languages.

> I'd be happy with "Dutch Saint Martin" and "French Saint Martin", or 
> with "North Saint Martin" and "South Saint Martin", or some such, if 
> it is the parentheses as such that are bothersome.

But I don't think anyone actually calls them by those names.

> But everyone else seem keen on keeping the same names as in the source 
> standard. And then you need to include the parenthetical part of the 
> name (as is), otherwise we'd be in the trouble as said above. (Which, 
> among other things, would lead to strange translation problems...)

I now think the best thing to do is to use the names with parenthesized 
part, as the only Description field for both MF and SX.  They are 
arguably the official ISO 3166-1 names, and they are descriptive enough 
to obviate the need for a Comments field, without being verbose or 
overly encyclopedic.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s ­



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