Subject: Re: [Ltru] extlang and stability of macrolanguage

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 20:52:56 -0600

Nicolas Krebs <nicolas1 dot krebs3 at netcourrier dot com> wrote:

> The meaning of rm has changed in january 2007
> http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2007-January/005615.html
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ltru-initial-06#page-24
> Type: language
> Subtag: rm
> Description: Raeto-Romance
> Added: 2005-10-16
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ltru-4645bis-05#page-27
> Type: language
> Subtag: rm
> Description: Romansh
> Added: 2005-10-16

This change, along with about 10 others, was actually made in the 
Registry on 2006-12-20, in response to name changes made by ISO 639-2/RA 
effective 2006-10-31.  The RA's notes indicate that these were changes 
in name only, not in denotation or "meaning," and I personally would 
tend to agree with that.  Description fields in the Registry are not 
normative; see RFC 4646, Section 3.1 (page 20 in the text version).

It's best to compare actual copies of the Registry rather than drafts. 
A *lot* has changed between the final RFC 4645 draft in October 2005 and 
today's RFC 4645bis drafts.  (I do have a complete archival collection 
of all published editions of the Registry, in an argon-filled glass case 
which I brought with me from the Orange Curtain to the Front Range.)

> I would had prefer that the maining of rm had not been changed, or at 
> least with a change notification in the registry, but this is another 
> subject wich has been discuted previously
> ( http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg06987.html ).

As John Cowan replied to you at that time (msg06988.html), our practice 
(by which I mean ietf-languages) is to mirror the ISO names, and change 
them when ISO changes them.  We do reserve the right to add additional 
names, or to choose not to follow ISO's changes, but that is not usually 
done, and was not done in this case.

> Lets suppose that later is added a new language code abc for 
> Rhaeto-Romance, added as Macrolanguage: for Rhaeto-Romance 
> languages...

I don't see what this has to do with renaming existing subtags.  ISO 639 
could assign any name they like to code element 'abc' and it wouldn't 
change anything about macrolanguage assignments.  Indeed, there are 
already several pairs of macrolanguage and individual language in ISO 
639-3 that have the same name, which must therefore be marked 
"(macrolanguage)" and "(individual language)" to disambiguate them.  No 
problem.

If you just wanted to discuss the pros and cons of extlang, that is 
fine, but I think Randy was looking for closure in the sense of 
thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

--
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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