"Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon dot com> wrote: >> 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. It's been claimed often on this list that macrolanguages are nothing but a standardization kludge or "shim" between ISO 639-2 and 639-3. Here is a direct quote from this list, from less than two weeks ago: "According to everything I've heard, the macrolanguage was devised as a construction which is an attempt to rationalize inconsistent approach to languages used by previous versions of ISO 639. It does not represent any particularly reality beyond that." That is completely different from the ISO 639-3/RA definition, the one Peter has quoted and paraphrased numerous times, the one I believe: "In various parts of the world, there are clusters of closely-related language varieties that... can be considered distinct individual languages, yet in certain usage contexts a single language identity for all is needed.... Where such situations exist, an identifier for the single, common language identity is considered in this part of ISO 639 to be a macrolanguage identifier." The first quote says macrolanguages do not represent reality; the second (ISO) quote defines them in terms of reality. The ISO definition is a "cover story" if it is simply an attempt at a legitimate-sounding explanation for what is really, under the surface, a kludge. I think if the RA really felt they were a kludge, they would have come out and said so (perhaps using a more dignified term than "kludge"). But the reality is there are plenty of situations, in all walks of life, where people think in terms of "the Chinese language" or "the Arabic language" and do not (need to) distinguish between the individual languages. Note, once again, that this is not an argument for or against extlang. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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