ISO 639-5 reconfirmation ballot (long)
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Sun Jul 17 05:20:25 CEST 2016
To the extent that Anthony is arguing that ISO 639-5 language
collections can't be correlated with individual languages, I certainly
agree that that is a problem.
To pick one example, ISO 639-5 provides the following hierarchy for
[cmc], "Chamic languages":
map : poz : pqw : cmc
This denotes the following relationship:
[map] Austronesian languages
+-- [poz] Malayo-Polynesian languages
+-- [pqw] Western Malayo-Polynesian languages
+-- [cmc] Chamic languages
But there's no way to look up what individual languages are contained
within [cmc]. For that matter, we can't tell except by exhaustive
scanning whether [cmc] contains other, lower-level collections.
I don't know if this can realistically be solved; see my earlier comment
about Ethnologue attempting to keep track of their own hierarchy, and
changing the relationships with some frequency. Still, I can see that it
limits the usefulness of the collections. Going back to my example of
tagging something as "Hmong-Mien languages," that might not help if
there is no common agreement on the members of the set of Hmong-Mien
languages.
I'm not quite as sympathetic to why it is such a problem that collection
codes cannot be easily distinguished at sight from individual language
codes. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org
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