Subject: Re: Suggested language for "mis" (Re: [Ltru] RE: ISO 639-2 decision:"mis")

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 11:38:09 -0700

Marion Gunn <mgunn at egt dot ie> wrote:

>> I'm a bit confused here. We want to try to give absoulte stability 
>> guarantees. But then we recommend 'und' (wrong to start with, because we 
>> know what language it is, so calling it undetermined is lying) or a 
>> private tag (inherently unstable and non-interoperable).
>
> Such confusion is among the many adverse effects of rashly converting the 
> domestic practice of one country (MARC, SIL, etc.) into international 
> standards, instead of building them brick by aware brick, as is normally 
> done. If Martin's current proposal (below) can go some way towards 
> countering the adverse efffect currently under discussion here, then he 
> has my support in that.

I think it is highly questionable to say that MARC was "rashly converted" 
into ISO 639-2 or that Ethnologue was "rashly converted" into ISO 639-3. 
Both MARC and Ethnologue existed for decades before being used as the basis 
for ISO standards.

The real problem is that MARC specified what "mis" was supposed to mean, but 
ISO 639-2 merely gave it the name "miscellaneous languages" and left it for 
implementations to figure out.

--
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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