Hi - As co-chair: It's odd that Marion's message was addressed to the ltru working group, and not to whatever the relevant ANSI-accredited committee would be, since the message appears to be a request for action to be taken by ANSI. As a technical contributor: The fact that someone happens to come from the US does not imply that ANSI has any influence whatsoever over their actions. ANSI is a private organization, not a government body, and it is just one of many standards-generating orgnizations in the US. It is an especially significant one, but by no means the only one. Randy ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marion Gunn" <mgunn at egt.ie> To: "LTRU Working Group" <ltru at ietf.org> Cc: "Sue Ellen Wright" <sellenwright at gmail.com>; "TC46-L Information and Documentation Technology List" <tc46-L at listserv.heanet.ie> Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 5:55 AM Subject: [Ltru] IPA, NSAI and ANSI To say Ireland (NSAI) is responsible for the refusal to register IPA as an ISO 15924 script is as unfair as it is untrue. I am writing to confirm that Irish users were as put out by that negative decision as users elsewhere, and that that negative decision was not made by NSAI. ISO 15924 is nominally the responsibility of ISO/TC 46, although not under normal TC 46 control, either, and that negative decision was made by the ISO 15924 advisory committee, currently made up as follows: One representative of the Registration Authority: Michael Everson, Evertype One representative of the ISO 639-2/RA: Randall K. Barry, Library of Congress One representative of ISO TC37: Håvard Hjulstad, Språk- og terminologitjenester One representative of ISO TC46: François Demay, Encyclopaedia Universalis Two representatives of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2: Rick McGowan, Unicode Consortium Ken Whistler, Sybase That AC failed to offer a cogent argument against tagging IPA in ISO 15924 and, during a public exchange on the LTRU list, its members all failed to address most of the points raised, for example, when Mark Davis of International Components for Unicode pointed out that [ISO 15924] already "incorporates variations which are essentially orthography (Hant vs Hans), and other differences that are simply glyphic variation (Fraktur Latin)" their answer was silence. The grounds for registering IPA as a script have been long since established: it looks like a script, behaves like a script and only requires standard ISO tagging to facilitate proper electronic script processing. An IPA tag is urgently needed by NSAI's Irish-speaking communities, (so I must continue pressing for it), as well as being needed by university researchers and practical speech therapists in so many countries that a positive decision to tag it for use needs to made without delay, to open the door for Net searches for texts written in IPA. Because that particular ISO AC was set up with a built-in US majority (4 out of 6), it is the logical responsibility of ANSI (_not_ NSAI) to ensure that such overloading in a big country's favour not be any excuse for refusing/delaying reasonable service requests from smaller countries. No country, however big it is, has any right to have such control over any international standards — however obtained, that amount of control carries with it an equal amount of answerability for concomitant results. Accordingly, I respectfully request that ANSI use its influence to to good effect, to persuade such members of the ISO 15924 AC as it can influence to reverse their negative decision in re registering IPA in ISO 15924. FWIW, I wish to affirm that I still believe in ISO 15924's potential quite as much as I did many years ago, when I was NSAI's sole representative in ISO/TC 37, where I first brought its first NWI draft to ISO/TC 37's attention (and after it was blocked in TC 37, supported its adoption in ISO/TC 46), that I regard its inception by Michael Everson as something very much to his credit, and that I would also regard it as to Mr Everson's credit were he now to reverse his vote (withdraw his opposition to registing IPA as a script). I hold it as a reasonable expectation that the rest would probably follow. mg Convener, NSAI ISO/TC 46 IG - - Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * mgunn at egt.ie * eamonn at egt.ie * _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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