Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:
It's going to be confusing no matter what we doConfusing is one thing, but two different language codes with the same description would be *broken*.
Of course, at least one of the subtags would have to have the description with parenthetical comment (individual/macro, or region). I never suggested that two subtags would have the exact same description. Indeed, that was a big point I raised months ago over "ASCII transliterations": there are certain "minimal pairs" that become identical if you remove diacritics.
Seriously, who lies about "sw", the registry or SIL ? Did we miss a bulk update of 639-1 codes ? I know that we talked about info in parentheses, but not this "Swahili" ambiguity, or did we ?
639-1 and 639-2 do not have this type of parenthetical information, because for them there are no macrolanguages, no regional language-name colisions, and no ambiguity.
We did have this discussion before. The reason it comes up again is that, now that my attention has been called to the "no inverted names" rule in 4646bis, it became clear that some of the 639-2 inverted names like "Greek, Modern (1453-)" would be removed. As long as that is the case, I wanted to know if "Ainu" and "Ainu (Japan)" both have to be retained, and if "Swahili" and "Swahili (macrolanguage)" both have to be retained, because the only purpose for keeping all of them is to have both 639-2 and 639-3 names, which is no longer guaranteed anyway.
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