Changing definition of German (was: Re: ISO 639-3 releases list of 2009 changes)

Kent Karlsson kent.karlsson14 at comhem.se
Sat Jan 23 23:12:32 CET 2010


Den 2010-01-23 19.55, skrev "Doug Ewell" <doug @ ewellic . org>:

> Mark Davis 🍵 <mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:
>
> > I'm not making myself clear.
> >
> > If the argument is that ISO 639-3 can't make a change in X *because
> > **the Ethnologue says Y, *it doesn't hold water, because the
> > Ethnologue is neither part of nor normatively referenced by ISO 639-3.
>
> To paraphrase myself from earlier, if ISO 639-3/RA is considering a
> change with which one or more of us disagrees -- say, hypothetically,
> converting 'deu' to a macrolanguage -- then we should lobby ISO 639-3/RA
> to reject the change request, not discuss it to death on this list
> before it has even been requested.

I agree with Mark that that is insufficient. And now we have to deal
with the undesirable after-effects from the RA's decision to reclassify
the code for Latvian (not Latvian itself, of course) to be a macrolanguage
code.

As far as I can tell, a language code can be reclassified to be a
collection code at any time as well. This has already happened for
"chs", Chumash (languages). (The receiving RA seems slow at adopting
this though...)

    /kent k




More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list