Re: Reopening RFC 1766 - Language Tags

From: Glenn Adams (glenn@stonehand.com)
Date: Mon Nov 27 1995 - 09:09:19 EST


The issue of SILs alleged activities as an organization or as its members has
no bearing on the current discussion.

The issue is how to extend RFC 1766 to provide a more comprehensive set
of langauge tags. The SIL set exists today and is the most comprehensive.
It is certainly not perfect, as would be the case for any attempt of this
sort. However, it exists.

Personally, I don't care whether or not its three letter names have any
mnemonic capacity or whether they reflect judgments that are different than
native populations. ISO SC2/WG2 is in a similar situation with regard to
character names in ISO 10646, and I don't have any sympathy for those who
would argue that one character name is better than another when.

The requirements I see as pertinent are:

1) comprehensiveness
2) uniqueness of identifiers
3) syntactic compatibility of identifiers with potential usages
4) publishing history

Thank you for your references. However, I doubt if I will read any of
them as I don't have any time or interest in exploring your contentions
as I feel they are completely irrelevant to the current topic.

If a language identifier list were developed by ISO of the scope of the SIL
list, then I would certainly endorse the ISO list first; however, I don't see
any such list forthcoming from ISO. Do you?

Regards,
Glenn Adams



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