"Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon dot com> wrote:
... We need to stop giving people the false impression, in drafts and mailing-list conversation, that it will be acceptable to use deprecated tags or subtags.No, we (at least most of us) have been consistent: it is always permitted that you can use a deprecated tag or subtag. From that perspective, it is "acceptable". However, it is not and has never been recommended.
If taggers are told in Section 3.1.5 that "validating processors SHOULD NOT generate these subtags" -- even though Section 2.1.9 does not mention the absence of deprecated subtags as a validity constraint -- then it does not seem consistent to say that both X-Y and Y are "freely allowed." Grudgingly, head-shakingly allowed, perhaps.
I will settle for whichever course the WG agrees upon (if it isn't a syntax error to say that), but I'm concerned about X-Y fans being misled about the social acceptability of using X-Y if it is deprecated.
How is it "just a different set of arbitrariness" if we handle all of the encompassed languages the same way, instead of hand-selecting a few macrolanguages like "zh" and treating their encompassed languages differently from, say, the languages encompassed by "fa"?There is inherent arbitrariness in the existing set (no, sh: take a bow), plus a certain amount of instability in 639-3's handling so far.
That isn't what I meant. We aren't responsible for the arbitrariness of the ISO standards.
And we've had plenty of discussions of languages such as Moldovan. Ultimately, the languages that matter are the very short list John Cowan and Peter Constable bruited awhile ago. The others we have allowed in out of a (I think misguided) sense of "fair play". I support John Cowan's observation that this is strictly a backwards compatibility mechanism, for which we have a specific list of languages.
I've asked WG participants who would like to change the list of extlangable macrolanguages to provide a plausible explanation for their list. I've seen some suggestions -- what we have minus 'sgn', just 'zh', just 'zh' and 'ar' -- but no text explaining the choice. I really don't want to write "because it felt right."
Is everyone satisfied with this explanation of why these particular languages were chosen?Yes, except you missed 'sgn'.
I omitted the discussion of 'sgn' on purpose, as I thought it might distract from the rationale for choosing some ISO 639-3 macrolanguages but not others. Also, I mistakenly thought the WG was in agreement about including 'sgn' on the list, and would be able to defend the decision.
What we need is a sense of whether we have a consensus for something. All of these proposals ring hollow for me because they seem to be addressing inchoate fears of what someone *might* say about the proposed document, not what people have actually said.
OK, I won't raise any more arguments about making the drafts defensible in IETF Last Call. You're right, it is speculative; the people who raised the same objections last time that I'm focusing on now (e.g. cherry-picking) might not even be active in IETF any more. Let's just do something, PLEASE, preferably some time before the London Olympics, and wait and see what happens.
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