Subject: Re: [Ltru] 'car' in different ISO 639 parts

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 21:21:12 -0600

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com> wrote:

>> because ISO 639-2 calls it simply "Malay" while ISO 639-3, which has 
>> to differentiate macrolanguage codes from individual language codes, 
>> calls it "Malay (macrolanguage)".  This doesn't pose a problem since 
>> the different names seem to refer to the same linguistic concept.
>
> These sound like two different things to me.  I would expect "Malay" 
> to refer to a subset of the things covered by the "Malay 
> macrolanguage", and would be very surprised if Malay were the only 
> member of that set.  Do we know whether they were intended to refer to 
> exactly the same sets of things?

I don't know, personally, now that the Carib thing comes up.  I wouldn't 
have ever guessed that 639-2 and -3 would use the same code element for 
things that were not meant to be exactly the same.  639-5 does broaden 
the scope of remainder groups, turning them into full language groups, 
but I assume the text of the standard carefully explains this action, so 
it is not a "quiet change."

The Carib problem does call in question the status of Malay and the 
other languages in the same boat (Dogri, Konkani, Swahili).  I am sorry 
to see this new can of worms open.

>> ISO 639-5 apparently redefines the 639-2 remainder groups to be full 
>> language groups, meaning that it considers 'gem' to cover all 
>> Germanic languages under 639-5, including those that have their own 
>> code, such as German.
>
> This sounds to me like progress.  For the applications I'm familiar 
> with, "Language groups" are more useful (and more stable) than 
> "remainder groups".

The concept is much more stable, and language tagging wonks should be 
delighted to see this change reflected in the Registry.

> To the 'car' question itself, at this point I can only respond "ugh," 
> so I didn't include ietf-languages at iana.org in my reply.

For now I am including both descriptions, "Carib languages" and "Galibi 
Carib", because the chances are that we will have to resolve the 
question of Malay et al. at the same time.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Arvada, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ 

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From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:45:39 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Doug Ewell

> to see this new can of worms open.

The Carib problem does *not* call other entries into question. We must not take a point error related to 'car' and turn that into a can of worms involving lots of other entries.

Peter

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:50:16 -0600

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> The Carib problem does *not* call other entries into question. We must 
> not take a point error related to 'car' and turn that into a can of 
> worms involving lots of other entries.

It's not my can of worms; I just identified the potential problem.  If 
this is an isolated error and doesn't extend to other code elements, 
then I'm relieved to hear it.