From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 07:56:13 CDT
> From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
> I see also in the ISO639-3 list of languages that the input form for
> selecting language names lacks an option for languages that don't
start by
> a letter
Thanks for that feedback.
> They have all Scope=I (Individual language), but Type=L (Living) or
Type=E
> (Extinct). Is that because they are still aliases, or still not
specified
> completely (notably their standard English names)? If not, then there
> shoudl
> be a "Other" option in the form input selector.
??? They are living or recently-extinct individual languages. What is
unclear about that?
> I'd like to know if these "!" or "/"
> or
> "=" or "'" are used to replace unencoded characters or diacritics, or
it's
> a
> technical issue on the Ethnologue.com and SIL.org web sites...
It's a limitation of ASCII -- the database involved has been around for
a long time -- something like 30 years.
> I suspect that "/" means the combining slash overlay, and "//" the
> combining
> double-slash overlay, I suspect the quote to to mean the apostrophe
letter,
> but what does the equal sign mean? I also suspect that those languages
> don't have known orthographies (only spoken for now)...
I can't comment on the phonemes that underly those characters. I suspect
that the slashes do not mean combining overlays. It is by no means safe
to assume that none of these languages have orthographies; one would
need to investigate to ascertain that.
> Are there projects to include in ISO 639-3 the alias names listed by
> Ethnologue?
ISO 639-3 requires only that a unique reference name be listed for each
language. It gives the registration authority freedom to document other
names.
> Are there projects to list the ISO 639-3 codes of individual languages
> refered by languages with Scope=C (collective languages
, such as
> "Afro-Asiatic (Other)" whose 639-2 code is "afa", or as "Bihari" whose
> 639-1
> and 639-2 codes are "bh" and "bih", but that won't have ISO 639-3
codes)?
> Same question for Scope=M (macrolanguages)?
Macrolanguages are listed in the data table for part 3. Identifiers for
collections of languages will be the focus of ISO 639-5.
> Or instead to include this reference within the meta-data associated
to
> each
> individual language (and so avoiding to change long lists of codes in
the
> meta-data associated with collective languages.)?
Collections will not be understood as remainders; they will include
languages that have their own ID.
> Finally, is ISO 639-3 meant to be used for tagging more precisely the
> various written or spoken texts or other localized data? What will be
the
> relation of ISO 639-3 with BCP 47 (notably will the ISO 639-1 and -2
codes,
> when they exist, be still preferable to the ISO 639-3 codes? I think
it
> should, so that existing documents and localized data won't need to be
> updated with new language codes)
That is the plan.
> I also hope that there's no conflict between 3-letter ISO 639-2 codes
and
> 3-letter ISO 639-3 codes
No, there is not.
Peter Constable
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