Subject: [Ltru] Narrowing of YU and title of ISO 639-2 (was: Re: Ltru Digest, Vol 48, Issue 40)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:43:51 -0700

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

> ...
> Only on 1993-07-15 intervened a minor change, transforming (YU, YUG, 
> 890) to (YU, YUG, 891)  marking the "narrowing" of the considered 
> territory without any change of the country name., that only changed 
> to SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO on 2003-07-23 when (YU, YUG, 890) was 
> deprecated. How does clause 3.4 manage with this interesting case ?

I think BCP 47 avoids having to deal with this because the narrowing of 
"Yugoslavia," from six member republics to two, happened well before the 
publication of RFC 4646 in 2006.  Before RFC 4646, language tags were 
defined as using ISO 3166 country code elements directly, and there was 
no claim that the language tagging spec would attempt to impose 
stability that wasn't present in the ISO standards.

I don't know (or remember) exactly how we would handle a case like 'YU' 
in the future.  Obviously the original meaning "language X as used in 
Yugoslavia" proved to be rather pointless, as the individual republics 
have since claimed that their usage of "Serbo-Croatian" constitutes not 
merely a separate language variety but a different language entirely. 
That might not be the case next time.

> 2-Concerning point 9.1 of 4646bis-21, the dates for standards should 
> be aligned with precision :
> -ISO 639-1 July 2002;
> -ISO 639-2 October 1998  (Moreover "first edition", that is not 
> included in the standard's title should be deleted );
> -ISO 639-3 February 2007;
> -ISO 646 December 1991.

Gérard had already written to me privately to make the change in the 
title of ISO 639-2 in draft-4645bis.  Co-chairs, please enter this into 
the issue tracker.  I assume it would be non-controversial.

As a side note, speaking as an individual, it is greatly appreciated if 
posters do NOT post the entire contents of a digest, including unrelated 
posts and headers, at the end of their messages.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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