I bet my 0.001 Yen that, in the future version of ISO 639, language names
"X" or "IANA" will be registered.
I would probably agree about "XX" or "IAN". But ISO/TC46 tends to like
uniformity in their schemes and, since they have never contemplated
single-character registrations, and it has taken them more than a decade
to become serious about moving to three characters, we are probably
reasonably safe. If people wanted to be completely safe, "IANA-" would
be spelled, e.g., "*-", just it get it to one unambigious character that
will never be registered under any plausible scenario.
I'm afraid you don't mind if thw work is useful only for the group of
proffessional Linguists who shares a single doctrine of linguistics.
Could you explain this comment? I don't think I see any problem as
long as good sense is used and the essentially arbitrary nature of this
type of classification is understood. I would like to see IANA given
guidance about what not to register, e.g., that one doesn't register one
639 language as a variant on another and that sufficient description
comes in to avoid clearly-redundant registrations, but, other than
that...
As we have discussed in other contexts, I don't think this sort of thing
is good enough for the finely-tuned discussions of professional
linguists who are trying to do comparative work. But my standing
hypothesis assumes that community will need the capability for *much*
more precise labelling, potentially on a per-word or per-phrase basis,
that is provided, e.g., by the TEI's use of SGML, rather than
per-message labels.
Since the original message has not yet caught up with me, I don't have a
clear picture of what problem this proposal is intended to fix. Those
who remember my Content-language pre-proposal of last spring will recall
that it was addressed to things like selection among multipart
alternatives, rather than solving, e.g., the distinction between Chines
and Japanese use of Han-derived characters.
john