Lang Gérard <gerard dot lang at insee dot fr> wrote:
1-Let me stress that I have, in fact, no "strenuous objection" with the recent "discover" that "langage des signes" became "langue des signes". But I have very strenuous objection about rewriting history and do not understand the strenuous resistance to the establishment of history. I agree without problem that in the past decade "scientific progress" admitted that "Sign languages" could be assimilated to "languages"and registered inside ISO 639-3.
Coding standards, and lists of entities coded to the standard, tend to make poor history books. Their main purpose is to keep up with changing situations and current needs. If this was indeed a change in scope for ISO 639, I suggest that looking at it as "rewriting history" is not the correct approach.
Standards do sometimes expand beyond the scope implied by the original title, as the needs of their users change. You no doubt understand this from your work with ISO 3166, which includes code elements for the names of such non-country entities as Greenland and British Indian Ocean Territory. I would consider it wholly inappropriate to criticize ISO 3166 for trying to "rewrite history" by claiming that these entities are countries.
But I want to be clearly understood that this was not in the intended scope of ISO 639 (and of ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2) until 2000.
Perhaps this is true; perhaps the omission of sign languages was simply an oversight, as Martin suggested. But whatever the scope was before, it now includes sign languages.
And I cannot prevent me to think that this "discover" is not completely independant of "political correctness".
You are permitted to think that.
2-As "codification of the representation of names of countries names and their subdivisions" is also clearly not independant from "political pressure", ISO 3166 has its share of pressure. So that, to give an example, we accepted the request of ROMANIA to change their alpha-3 code element from "ROM" to "ROU".
Yes, that change was well understood as being completely political. Those of us who deal with language tags were grateful that only the alpha-3 code element was changed, and not the alpha-2. We now have rules in place to ensure stability of language tags in case another such change is approved that does affect the alpha-2.
This is also the case for the addition of "Letzeburgesh" (lb,ltz) or "Bosnian" (bs,bos); this would also be the case for the language name "Montenegrin" that is now recognized as the official language of MONTENEGRO (Maybe you were thinking to Montenegrin when you wrote Macedonian ?) and is certainly a new "language name" covered by ISO 639..
Yes, I was of course thinking of Montenegrin. Thank you for the correction.
Newly formed countries want to establish their own national identity. This is completely reasonable. Persuading the registration agency for an international coding standard to register a new code element for "their language," when it is actually a dialect of an existing language and not a separate language with mutual unintelligibility, is not reasonable on linguistic grounds. It is purely political, much more demonstrably so than including sign languages along with spoken languages in a standard that encodes names of "languages."
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