Subject: [Ltru] Extlangs or not? (was: Re: diffs, changes, etc.)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:58:33 -0700

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

> 3.4.10  Same here.  Let's get rid of extlang-monsters a.s.a.p.

Please, group, let us decide NOW, once and for all, whether we are going 
to have extlangs or not.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
RFC 4645  *  UTN #14

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:56:12 +0200

Doug Ewell wrote:

>> Let's get rid of extlang-monsters a.s.a.p.

> Please, group, let us decide NOW, once and for all, whether
> we are going to have extlangs or not.

The comment above was about a case xy-uvw, where uvw is later
added to 639-2.  Addison's draft says "keep xy-uvw and ignore
uvw" (first come, first served).  I proposed "add uvw as new
language tag, deprecate extlang uvw with Preferred-Value uvw"
(shortest 639 tag wins).

Frank

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From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:00:35 -0700

> language tag, deprecate extlang uvw with Preferred-Value uvw"

The question in my mind is whether the ISO 639-2 designation causes the 
language to actually escape from its collective or macro-language. My 
guess is that it does not.

In particular, I note that ISO 639-2 serves folks like librarians. At 
some point in time, all of the ISO 639-3 codes could escape from "639-3 
gaol" for use in libraries. This won't have any effect at all on the 
language itself or our understanding of the language. It's just that 
639-2 is a narrower profile than 639-3.

Another point: I believe that assigning code 'uvw' in ISO 639-2 will NOT 
cause it to be removed from the ranks of the 639-3 codes.

What Frank proposes would invalidate tags and implementations in the 
field and require newer implementations to map 'xyz-uvw' => 'uvw' during 
matching. I think this is a Bad Thing.

I do support Frank in wanting the fewest extlangs possible. The rules as 
I've currently written them will most likely create quite extensive 
lists of them. It might be nice if we could cherry-pick somehow (that 
is, have mostly language subtags with very few extlangs), but any rules 
we would invent for that would be entirely arbitrary.

The only non-arbitrary rule I can think of is: we only introduce 
"enclosing" languages for those that are already registered as such. 
That is:

"zh"
"sgn"

Everything else is a language.

Thoughts?

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

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From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:08:48 -0700

From: Addison Phillips [mailto:[email-masked]] 

> 639-2 is a narrower profile than 639-3.

It's not appropriate to think in terms of "639-3 gaol"; it is absolutely appropriate to think in terms of "639-2 is a narrower profile than 639-3".

It's one code space. The set of alpha-3 IDs for collections will be listed in 639-5; the set of alpha-3 IDs for individual languages and macrolanguages will be listed in 639-3. A subset of these of considered to be of interest to particular user communities will be delineated in 639-2.

It's entirely possible that at some point in the future the existing parts 639-x will go away, and that there will be one published standard for alpha-3 IDs with one or more "profiles" (i.e., subsets) defined for use in particular applications. At that point in time, the questions being asked here about whether to use descriptions from part 2 or part 3 will be meaningless: there will be only one standard.

> cause it to be removed from the ranks of the 639-3 codes.

That is more than a belief; it is fact.

> we would invent for that would be entirely arbitrary.

I don't know why anybody has a problem with extlangs. I don't expect a lot of extlangs will occur in the wild: they can only exist in cases like zh and ar where the majority of content by far will use the macrolanguage ID and nothing more because the macrolanguage ID is already widely used. Keep in mind the whole point of the notion of macrolanguages: the collective gets referred to in existing applications as though its one language while gauged by other measures its multiple languages. We ought to want a matching relationship to exist in these cases; extlangs give us that with no additional machinery.

Peter Constable

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:28:06 -0400

> Everything else is a language.

That rule is very arbitrary; it arbitrarily says that due to an accident
of history you can use "zh" to mean "any kind of Chinese" but you cannot
use "my" for "any kind of Malay", although the facts on the ground are
exactly parallel.  Instead, to deal reliably with Malay you must be
aware of a whole bunch of syntactically unrelated tags.

-- 
Only do what only you can do.               John Cowan <[email-masked]>
  --Edsger W. Dijkstra's advice
    to a student in search of a thesis