Re: [Ltru] Macrolanguage, Extlang. The Sami language situation as example

["Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon.com>]

> I'm one of apparently few people who truly believe the ISO 639-3/RA
> definition of "macrolanguage," and don't think of it as some kind of
> cover story.

Since we have the direct testimony of the folks who conceived of macrolanguage, I don't see any reason why anyone would believe otherwise. What we have been debating is whether the Macrolanguage concept is of use in the structure of "our" language tags, and, if so, how (rather than the reverse). One of the problems macrolanguage brings us is that it is *not* just a "cover story": ISO 639-3 made an honest effort to catalog all macrolanguages, not just the ones that are useful to us. As a result, we have Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, and some others that do not play well with extlangs (and we have other languages, such as 'zh', that complicate life without extlang).

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ltru-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ltru-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of
> Doug Ewell
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 11:29 PM
> To: LTRU Working Group
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Macrolanguage, Extlang. The Sami language situation
> as example
>
> Leif Halvard Silli <lhs at malform dot no> wrote:
>
> > In that regard: Do you think that it is possible that extlang in
> > itself could be misperceived by ISO? Could the ISO think that LTRU
> > *wants* them to define Macrolanguaes, which then would become extlang
> > tagged - or something like that? Or, could ISO begin wanting to
> > interfer with this group, or perhaps refrain from defining
> > macrolanguages, picking other methods for grouping languages, because
> > they don't like the extlang tagging that it leads to?
>
> I think ISO 639-3/RA assigns code elements for 7700 languages in the
> best way they know how, and doesn't make a single decision -- not one -
> -
> on the basis of what LTRU will or won't do.
>
>
> --
> 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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