Re: [Ltru] ISO 639-6 (was: Geocoordinates)

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> ... The boonts and fonipas and njivas would be completely overwhelmed 
>> by the oceans of 6xxxx subtags.
>
> And a Good Thing Too.  Boontling is a variety of English, and ought to 
> have a 639-6 code element.  Fonipa is a kludge to compensate for a 
> limitation in ISO 15924.  With 639-6 we don't need to register 
> variants, we make people go to 639-6/RA instead.

Then if you like, view the "legacy" variants as warts on the side of a 
collection of '6' variants.  Doesn't matter; the warts are not going 
away.

Despite its size and ambitious goals, and the expertise of those 
preparing it, I would be very surprised if 639-6 encompassed a proper 
superset of everything that has ever been (a) registered in the Registry 
or (b) taken seriously but not registered in the Registry, going back to 
the whole tags registered under RFC 1766/3066.  That is one of the major 
problems with claiming that 639-6 will enable ietf-languages to be shut 
down.

The other, of course, is that we have 14 years of history with a 
Reviewer and a discussion list that offers him advice, and RFC 4646 and 
draft-4646bis have expanded their role to include vetting of new and 
changed subtags stemming not only from user requests, but from changes 
to the core ISO and UN standards.  We have six such requests pending 
right now.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
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