Re: Plane 14 redux

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@compuserve.com)
Date: Sat Sep 02 2000 - 21:02:15 EDT


John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org> wrote:

> I agree with most of this, except for bypassing RFC 1766 and its
> eventual successor. ISO 639 has very definite rules about what
> languages can and cannot get coded, which most of the languages of
> the world, even the written languages, don't meet. There is need for
> a general, extensible language and language-variety tagging standard,
> and there is nothing superior in flexibility and general acceptance
> to RFC 1766. Its only real competitor is the SIL set, and an effort
> is underway to incorporate it en masse (or nearly so) into the RFC
> 1766 registry.

The draft of the eventual successor to RFC 1766 allows a great deal more
flexibility than the original, in terms of allowing 3-letter language
codes and such. Perhaps more importantly, it specifies that the *most
recently updated* versions of 639 and 3166 and their associated code
lists are to be used, so there should no misunderstanding about being
tied to the 1988 version of anything.

So maybe updating UTF #7 in terms of the new RFC would be sufficient
after all.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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