Subject: [Ltru] Macrolanguage churn (was: Re: I'm really confused by chinese in 3066bis)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 22:31:03 -0600

Debbie Garside <debbie at ictmarketing dot co dot uk> wrote:

> Are there likely to be additional Macrolanguages created in the 
> future?

During the 2007 review period, ISO 639-3 reclassified two individual 
languages into macrolanguages (kln, luy) and changed the list of 
encompassed languages for four other macrolanguages (gba, hmn, msa, 
zha).  Most of these membership changes were secondary effects of the 
encompassed languages having being split or merged.

They rejected one additional request to reclassify (kha) to a 
macrolanguage, instead creating the Khasi/Lyngngam quasi-narrowing 
situation that we talked about at length.  They did not create any new 
macrolanguages from scratch, nor delete any, though in theory that would 
be possible.

I have no reason to think this will not happen again during 2008 and 
beyond.

RFC 4646bis will follow all of these ISO 639-3 changes; unlike extlangs, 
the Macrolanguage field is meant to correlate 1-to-1 with ISO 639-3.

--
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: "Phillips, Addison" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 21:41:09 -0700

> I have no reason to think this will not happen again during 2008 and

I think we can reasonably postulate that ISO 639-3, maintained by a group considered more "splitter" than "lumper" when it comes to languages, will find some opportunity at some time in the future to split one of the language codes. They will be more likely to create new Macrolangauges if it can be demonstrated that this is not disruptive. Our goal should be to make it as undisruptive as possible (but not more so).

> the Macrolanguage field is meant to correlate 1-to-1 with ISO 639-3.

It is possible for extlang to correlate 1:1 with 639-3. In previous edits, for reasons of compatibility, we chose not to make it so. There is some struggle with squaring the rules for what is and what is not a potential extlang that we've haven't seen on list of late simply because we haven't discussed extlangs as other than theoretical constructs. I would point out that, for all the discussion of Serbo-Croatian and Norwegian on this list, there was historically no proposal to actually make extlangs for these languages because all of the encompassed languages have ISO 639-1 codes.

Addison