Subject: Re: [Ltru] UNGEGN definitions and UNICODe Glossary of terms

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 07:00:27 -0600

I thought it had already been established that:

1.  our terminology is largely consistent with UNGEGN (except that we 
don't classify certain types of scripts as "defective"), so we have no 
changes to make there, and

2.  neither LTRU nor ietf-languages is responsible for either the 
French-language title of ISO 639 nor the decision to include sign 
languages in the scope of that standard (though we agree with that 
decision), so we have no changes to make there either.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, 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: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 06:59:26 -0600

Lang Gérard <gerard dot lang at insee dot fr> wrote:

> 1-Let me stress that I have, in fact, no "strenuous objection" with 
> the recent "discover" that "langage des signes" became "langue des 
> signes". But I have very strenuous objection about rewriting history 
> and do not understand the strenuous resistance to the establishment of 
> history. I agree without problem that in the past decade "scientific 
> progress" admitted that "Sign languages" could be assimilated to 
> "languages"
> and registered inside ISO 639-3.

Coding standards, and lists of entities coded to the standard, tend to 
make poor history books.  Their main purpose is to keep up with changing 
situations and current needs.  If this was indeed a change in scope for 
ISO 639, I suggest that looking at it as "rewriting history" is not the 
correct approach.

Standards do sometimes expand beyond the scope implied by the original 
title, as the needs of their users change.  You no doubt understand this 
from your work with ISO 3166, which includes code elements for the names 
of such non-country entities as Greenland and British Indian Ocean 
Territory.  I would consider it wholly inappropriate to criticize ISO 
3166 for trying to "rewrite history" by claiming that these entities are 
countries.

> But I want to be clearly understood that this was not in the intended 
> scope of ISO 639 (and of ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2) until 2000.

Perhaps this is true; perhaps the omission of sign languages was simply 
an oversight, as Martin suggested.  But whatever the scope was before, 
it now includes sign languages.

> And I cannot prevent me to think that this "discover" is not 
> completely independant of "political correctness".

You are permitted to think that.

> 2-As "codification of the representation of names of countries names 
> and their subdivisions" is also clearly not independant from 
> "political pressure", ISO 3166 has its share of pressure. So that, to 
> give an example, we accepted the request of ROMANIA to change their 
> alpha-3 code element from "ROM" to "ROU".

Yes, that change was well understood as being completely political. 
Those of us who deal with language tags were grateful that only the 
alpha-3 code element was changed, and not the alpha-2.  We now have 
rules in place to ensure stability of language tags in case another such 
change is approved that does affect the alpha-2.

> This is also the case for the addition of "Letzeburgesh" (lb,ltz) or 
> "Bosnian" (bs,bos); this would also be the case for the language name 
> "Montenegrin" that is now recognized as the official language of 
> MONTENEGRO (Maybe you were thinking to Montenegrin when you wrote 
> Macedonian ?) and is certainly a new "language name" covered by ISO 
> 639..

Yes, I was of course thinking of Montenegrin.  Thank you for the 
correction.

Newly formed countries want to establish their own national identity. 
This is completely reasonable.  Persuading the registration agency for 
an international coding standard to register a new code element for 
"their language," when it is actually a dialect of an existing language 
and not a separate language with mutual unintelligibility, is not 
reasonable on linguistic grounds.  It is purely political, much more 
demonstrably so than including sign languages along with spoken 
languages in a standard that encodes names of "languages."

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 07:04:38 -0600

I have no problem with including the reference to RFC 3339; I just 
wanted to point out that it could be omitted, to make the point about 
ISO 8601.

I also have no problem with not including the bit about notifying the 
ISO 3166/MA.