ISO 639-3 releases list of 2009 changes

[Leif Halvard Silli]

John Cowan, Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:03:19 -0500:
> Mark Davis ☕ scripsit:

( I placed back the cappuccino letter that John's mailer destroyed.) 
;-) 

>> The way we have it set up, it isn't for us to decide. But consumers 
>> of BCP47 (like CLDR) do have to, if ISO continues to change
>> languages into macrolanguages 

If you by that mean that CLDR should try to annulate the effect of 
macrolanguages, then I think rather the opposite is the way to go. 
Though, of course, every case should be treated independently, I guess.

>>(will German be next?).
> 
> Very improbable, given the description of 'de(u)' in Ethnologue.
> Though Ethnologue is no more immune to error than ISO 639 [*], it does
> provide the denotation of the vast majority of 639-3 code elements, and
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=deu is clearly about
> Standard German as spoken from Belgium to Kazakhstan, not any other kind
> of German.  It would be a massive and unnecessary widening of the term
> to turn it into a macrolanguage of any sort.

But even so, the CLDR issue can be looked at from another angle than 
the one Mark does:

It has been pointed out that CLDR is derived from BCP47 and not the 
other way around. Currently the CLDR treats 'no' as a synonym of 'nb' 
(I would like to file a bug against this when I have power to follow it 
up ...)  However, just as CLDR this way overrules the effect of a 
macrolanguage classification,  it could also go the other way and 
effectively treat 'de' as a macrolanguage/fallback code for  e.g. 
'gsw'. That to me seems as often a quite reasonable think to do. It 
would not not need to affect how language tagging should be performed 
however - it could remain "forbidden" to tag "gsw" content as "de".
-- 
leif halvard silli