Subject: [Ltru] Re: Is 639-3 bogus ?

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:18:52 -0700

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

>> What point are you getting at? (I really haven't a clue.)
>
> How reliable and useful is the info, and should the registry
> contain a source indication for alpha-3 language subtags if
> there are major differences between 639-2 and 639-3.  Maybe
> it's possible to delete "orq" from 639-3 later, but it's not
> possible to remove it from the LSR.

Even if Orcish is goofy and fake, it is part of the Final Draft 
Standard, every bit as much as German.  We don't have any justification 
for picking the code elements we like from any ISO standard and 
discarding the others.

One of my personal "least favorites" in ISO 639-3 is Yinglish ("yib"), 
which is really just a smattering of Yiddish-based and -inspired words 
embedded in normal English.  It's not even as much of a dialect as 
Boontling.  The description in Ethnologue calls it "a variety of English 
influenced by Yiddish (lexically, particularly, but also grammatically 
and phonetically)" but no evidence is given for differences other than 
vocabulary.  The Wikipedia article focuses entirely on vocabulary.

Nevertheless, there it is in ISO/FDIS 639-3, and so there it is in 
draft-4645bis.

Orcish and its 30 words do give me renewed hope for Unilingua and its 
187-page textbook:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/en/c/c7/Unilingua.pdf

--
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: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:31:11 -0700

Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> wrote:

> What I was looking for was:
>
>   http://www.sil.org/iso639%2D3/macrolanguages.asp
>
> And:
>
>   http://www.sil.org/iso639%2D3/scope.asp#M
>
> Ideally, extended language subtags would be restricted to the list in 
> the first link above and 4646bis would reflect that fact. I don't want 
> to construct that list from the registry: I would prefer something 
> much more cut-and-dried, i.e. getting it from ISO 639-3.

Just in case that was confusing to anyone:  Extended language subtags 
are for languages encompassed by macrolanguages, not for the 
macrolanguages themselves.  I know Addison knows that.

> Now, all that said, I think it would be useful to include a "type" 
> field for "collective" languages (with the warnings about their 
> suitability proposed by John) and for "macro" languages (defining what 
> can be used as a prefix value in an extlang).

In his reply, Peter is of course correct that "Type" and "Scope" are two 
different things in 639-3.  But if it would help anyone, they could be 
combined into a single informational field in the Registry.  All 
macrolanguages ("M") are living languages ("L"), so there would be no 
need for compound Language-Type values glued together by commas.

If we want to discourage tag producers from using subtags based on 
"collective codes," but don't want to indicate them in the Registry, I 
hope we have some alternative plan.  Looking for the word "languages" or 
"(Other)" in the Description does not tell the whole story.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:53:49 -0700

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> IMO, there's no particular reason for members of this WG to be second 
> guessing whether the content of ISO 639-3 is good enough for use in 
> the LSR.

+1

I would add that asking, rhetorically or otherwise, whether 639-3 is 
bogus because it contains Orcish is akin to asking whether 639-2 is 
bogus because it encodes Klingon, or 15924 because it encodes Tengwar, 
or 3166-1 because it encodes Bouvet Island.  It takes a lot more than 
one or two questionable entries to make an entire standard bogus.

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 08:28:08 +0200

Doug Ewell wrote:
 
> We don't have any justification for picking the code elements
> we like from any ISO standard and discarding the others.

It's our duty to stop it if it's not acceptable as IANA registry.
An old draft of what's now RFC 4589 was in a questionable state,
it was fixed after the IETF Last Call.

> One of my personal "least favorites" in ISO 639-3 is Yinglish
> ("yib"), which is really just a smattering of Yiddish-based and
> -inspired words embedded in normal English.

Sometimes he-who-must-not-be-named is right with his fears, there
is a fatal trend to register anything remotely related to English,
from Boont over yib and Shavian up to proposals to "unicode" some
inverted letters only because they are used in Finnegans Wake.

> The description in Ethnologue calls it "a variety of English
> influenced by Yiddish (lexically, particularly, but also
> grammatically and phonetically)"

Maybe it is useful as some kind of mixed language.  Over here we
have DEnglish (all kinds of bad en as spoken + written in D/A/CH,
and more important all kinds of de abusing random English words 
to emulate some global touch, "handy" for "cell phone", and tons
of similar inventions).  About a century ago they did the same
with French words.

More likely yib is a similar case as "Kanak Sprak", a mixture of
de, en, and tr.  There are certainly more lyrics, literature, and
videos in "Kanaksprak" than the 30 words "orq".

> Orcish and its 30 words do give me renewed hope for Unilingua
> and its 187-page textbook:

I found <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unilingua/Print_version> -
and an article about the 56 words of Lapine in "Watership down".
That's all fascinating, but not the stuff for language subtags.

Frank

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From: "Mark Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 08:32:53 -0700

Agreed