Re: [Ltru] ISO 639 language code addition rules...

["Mark Davis" <mark.davis at icu-project.org>]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 1:19 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

Mark Davis scripsit:

> In general, I think adding 639-5 codes would be a good idea, as long as the
> list will be publicly available by the time we release. I'm however a bit
> concerned by the issues raised by John, of codes that have the same
> denotation as 639-3 codes; we need to resolve that before we can have a full
> consensus. (We have to discuss this, but my preference for John's cases
> would be rather than excluding the codes, to deprecate&prefer the others.)

I don't understand the purpose of this.  When we added the 639-2 codes,
we did not add 'eng' as a pre-deprecated subtag with a Preferred-Value of
'en'.  If we have good reason to exclude something, we should exclude it.

It is not so black and white. The advantage of adding something as deprecated is that we have a formal relation between it and the preferred-value. That helps in cases where people have expected that everything in a particular set (eg 639-5) would work.

I wouldn't actually mind having "eng" in and deprecated to "en"; we end up having to do that in software anyway because it occurs sufficiently often.

 

> On the part of the two-letter primary language subtags, I think our best
> approach would just disallow them. While it wole it would be very unlikely that this
> would ever happen, it is very simple for us to prevent any instabilities
> that might occur.

639-1 should stay in, because we might have another politically motivated
split where the successor languages are individually important enough
to get 639-1 codes.

That is possible, and now that I think about it the above logic would point in that direction. I guess the only restriction we'd have to make is that it cannot be introduced *after* an equivalent three-letter code.

--
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application:     John Cowan
       WELCOME TO <censored>                   cowan at ccil.org
       DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

-- 
Mark
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