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.
Unless ISO maliciously tries to do so, yes, probably.
Anyway, as 26*26*26+26*26=18252, the 2 or 3 letter space is not large
enough to give meaningful names to all the languages in the world.
The country name is useful to disambiguate english between several
countries but not so useful in general as the most of the not-so-famous
languages are used within a single country.
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?
For example, how can you measure the difference between en-cockney, en-au,
current en-gb and en-gb 300 years ago?
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...
Without a single doctrine, how can IANA recognize something is
"cleary-redundant"? I think it inappropriate to expect IANA judge highly
pedantic and political issues.
Also, it is impractical to use country codes. They are quite unstable
that it can not be used without time stamp. Also, 3166 can not be used
to currently-non-existing countries.
That's why I proposed that the distinction should be by location and by
time.
A possible improvement is to allow mnemonic IANA registration as an
acronym of location and time, nothing more than that and let pedantic
and political issues be confined in 639.
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.
That is my problem too. If ISO is revising 639, why can't we use the
revised one as is?
Unless we know why we need detailed extension, we can't design how
the extension should be.
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.
So, if we need selection among multipart alternatives, isn't revised
639 enough? If not, why?
Masataka Ohta