Subject: [Ltru] Last few questions for draft-4645bis-01

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:49:54 -0800

Spurred on by the great outpouring of responses (ahem) to my earlier 
questions, I'm just about ready to crank out draft-ietf-ltru-4645-01. 
(Not -02 as I've said before; I'd forgotten over the months that I never 
submitted -01.)

Some of the resolved issues are as follows:

- Whether to include all names from ISO 639-3 or, in cases where 
inverted/uninverted pairs exist, only one or the other.  Answer: include 
all.

- Whether to create a new Reference-Name field.  Answer: no.

- Whether to make the first Description field equivalent to the ISO 
639-3 reference name, when one exists.  Answer: yes, at least in 
practice.  Specifying this as normative or not is up to RFC 4646bis.

- Whether to split compound ISO 15924-based Description fields into 
multiple lines.  Answer: yes, but only for those names indicated in the 
post I sent to the WG on January 3.

Here are the last few questions I still have, along with the default 
answers I will apply for each unless somebody states otherwise, and 
quickly:

- ISO 639-2 has "Castilian" with one L, while ISO 639-3 has "Castillian" 
with two L's.  Use one or the other, or both?  (Default: Holding my 
nose, I say "only the two-L version" purely because it is the 639-3 
reference name.  Personally I greatly prefer the one-L spelling, and 
hope the 639-2 and 639-3 people can get together and agree on a 
spelling.)

- ISO 639-2 has "Galician" while ISO 639-3 still has "Gallegan."  Use 
one or the other, or both?  (Default: Both.)

- ISO 639-3 has parenthetical comments after some names, such as "Gaelic 
(Scots)" and "Ainu (Japan)" and "Gbaya (Central African Republic)", 
where ISO 639-2 has simply "Gaelic" and "Ainu" and "Gbaya."  Use one or 
the other, or both?  (Default: Both.)

- For the macrolanguages Dogri, Konkani, Malay, and Swahili, ISO 639-3 
has the parenthetical comment "(generic)", while for the individual 
languages of the same name (plus Zande) it has the comment "(specific)". 
Use these?  (Default: No, rip them out.  There will be no name conflicts 
since the former is always a primary language subtag and the latter an 
extlang.  In the case of Zande there is no conflict with the 
corresponding collection code "Zande languages.")

- Should we maintain the relative order of existing Description fields 
and add new 639-3-based descriptions at the end, except that the 
reference name always becomes the first Description?  (Default: Yes.)

- In an early update, IANA added the 3-letter language subtags "anp" and 
"frr" among the 2-letter subtags.  Traditionally the 2-letter subtags 
come first, followed by the 3-letter ones.  RFC 4646 says the order of 
language subtags doesn't matter as long as all are together in one 
group.  Should we move "anp" and "frr" back among the 3-letter subtags 
where humans might expect them, or leave them as is?  (Default: Move 
them.)

- Section 2.4 of draft-4645bis-00 has the sentence, "Grandfathered tags 
cannot be generated from a combination of valid subtags, while 
'redundant' tags can be."  This is not strictly true; "zh" and "min" are 
valid subtags but the combination is not semantically equivalent to the 
grandfathered tag "zh-min."  Should this be changed almost imperceptibly 
to read, "... cannot be generated from a valid combination of subtags"? 
(Default: Yes.)

If you have comments on any of this, please speak up soon.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

_______________________________________________
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---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:12:36 +0100

Doug Ewell wrote:

> ISO 639-2 has "Castilian" with one L, while ISO 639-3 has "Castillian"

+1  Google has about 1,140,000 hits for one L, and 280,000 for LL.
    MW has Castlian and no Castillian.  Maybe it's a typo in 639-3,
    they should fix it.  Until then use their spelling.

> ISO 639-2 has "Galician" while ISO 639-3 still has "Gallegan."  Use

Ugh.  I hope that Galician wins.  Until then "both" is fine.

> ISO 639-3 has parenthetical comments after some names, such as "Gaelic

The 639-3 name with comments is better.

> For the macrolanguages Dogri, Konkani, Malay, and Swahili, ISO 639-3

+1

> Should we maintain the relative order of existing Description fields

If you like it that way...  what you get will be 639-3 reference before
639-1/2 descriptions before other 639-3 descriptions (modulo duplicates)

I'd prefer a block of 639-3 descriptions automatically starting with the
reference name before anything else found in 639-1/2, but that's mostly
a matter of taste.  Maybe my preference is better for maintenance (?)

> In an early update, IANA added the 3-letter language subtags "anp" and

+1

> Section 2.4 of draft-4645bis-00 has the sentence, "Grandfathered tags

+1

Frank

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:14:00 -0500

> corresponding collection code "Zande languages.")

I'm against this, since it seems to me that it's likely to recur and we
will have to strip more prefixes.  For example, if Foovian (hypothetical)
has a deviant Bazzian dialect, and 639-3/RA decides that Bazzian is
really a separate language, we may wind up with "Foovian (generic)",
"Foovian (specific)" and "Bazzian".  We would therefore have to put the
rule for stripping these things directly into 4646bis.

Worse yet, 639-3/RA may introduce a macrolanguage that encompasses
existing languages.  For example, if it turns out that a code is needed
that encompasses the larger Toto language and its close but smaller
relatives Titi, Tata, and Tutu (all hypothetical), the most natural
name for this macrolanguage may turn out to be "Toto (generic)", with a
concomitant name change of "Toto" to "Toto (specific)".  Remember that
macrolanguages represent facts on the ground about how people talk
about languages.

Now, however, Toto (specific), Titi, Tata, and Tutu cannot and will not
be made into extlangs, because they already have language subtags which
we cannot invalidate.  So if we strip the generic/specific markers,
we wind up with two languages called "Toto".  Very bad.

So let's leave these names, like all other names, strictly alone.  If we
can swallow the Latin-1 stand-alone acute accent, we can swallow anything.

-- 
John Cowan      <[email-masked]>       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
                Charles li reis, nostre emperesdre magnes,
                Set anz totz pleinz ad ested in Espagnes.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:08:34 -0800

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> Now, however, Toto (specific), Titi, Tata, and Tutu cannot and will 
> not be made into extlangs, because they already have language subtags 
> which we cannot invalidate.  So if we strip the generic/specific 
> markers, we wind up with two languages called "Toto".  Very bad.

We already have the potential for this in Dimli and Kirmanjki, two 
alternative names for "zza" that are also the names for the individual 
languages "diq"  and "kiu".  Right now there is no conflict, but if 
"diq" and "kiu" were not encompassed we would have a problem.

> So let's leave these names, like all other names, strictly alone.  If 
> we can swallow the Latin-1 stand-alone acute accent, we can swallow 
> anything.

OK.  But I hope in the future we will be able to correct obvious errors 
like the acute accent without objections of infidelity to the standard.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:35:12 -0800

Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]> wrote on 01/12/2007 05:12:36 

>     they should fix it.  Until then use their spelling.

This is definitely a spelling mistake and needs fixing, though I agree 
process-wise that ISO 639-3 needs to fix this and we should inherit the 
change once it's made. This error is pretty common as the term castellano 
in Spanish has two L's, but the English word does not. 

Who do we ping to get the ISO 639-3 data changed ASAP? 

This is not listed as an alternative spelling in any dictionary I have and 
I have a few. :)

Regards,

Karen Broome

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 17:32:44 +0100

[email-masked] wrote:

> This error is pretty common as the term castellano in Spanish
> has two L's, but the English word does not.

BTW, the "Gallegan" might be similar, I found "Gallego" with
Britannica, and the MW site told me that their info about 
"Gallegan" is only available for paying users.

> Who do we ping to get the ISO 639-3 data changed ASAP?

Whoever it is, I want the URL in 4646bis :-)

Frank

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:02:30 -0500

> "Gallegan" is only available for paying users.

The unabridged M-W tells us that "Gallegan" is a synonym for "Galician".

> Whoever it is, I want the URL in 4646bis :-)

mailto:[email-masked] , as a quick check of the 639-3 home page at
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3 reveals.

-- 
Yes, chili in the eye is bad, but so is your    John Cowan
ear.  However, I would suggest you wash your    [email-masked]
hands thoroughly before going to the toilet.    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --gadicath