An exchange on WG-ltru documents (I do not say "support": the reader
will judge) the positions I support.
It involves:
- Peter Constable: one of the initiator of the project and author of
ISO 639-3 which lists 7500 languages and is used in building langtags
- Doug Ewel: author of the Draft concerning the initial content of the registry
- Debbie Garside: the author of ISO 639-6
At 22:20 28/08/2005, Peter Constable wrote:
[I'll preface this reply by saying that we don't want to spend too much
time discussing issues that are not of immediate concern while we've got
the matching draft and IETF last call on the registry drafts to deal
with. So, I won't pursue this thread much longer.]
The proposed Draft is based upon ISO 639-1,2,3 lists of language
names. ISO 639-6 is a list of language use names and IDs. The
proposed langtag is an arbitrary limited compound of three
information: language name, script and country. A language
identification MAY call for far more elements, and deliver much more
information. However these three basic elements are necessary to sell
lingually related products (contract, ads, documentation, bills) and
identify the current status of the art "locales" (CLDR project).
The alternative seems to be:
- GO for an e-commercial only multilingual internet, for ever.
- NO we do not want the Multilingual Internet to be only commercial.
The decision is NOW. And we understand Peter and the authors wants to
win now, because they have real needs to address now.
But I do not think there is a need for anyone to "win". There is a
third response.
- GO for an e-commercial multilingual internet support now, as
default/immediate solution
- YES to a generalised Multilingual Internet hooked to the RFC 3066
Draft how poor it is, using its reserved ABNF hooks.
This means that:
- "fr-Latn-fr" is the default tag based upon ISO 639-1/2/3
- "x-fran" is a private use tag based upon ISO 639-6
- "0-jefsey.com:franver" is my vision of the French at the Palace of
Versailles. Documented by an ISO 11179 conformant system (see below)
> From:Doug Ewell
> I'm a bit surprised that a work characterized as a work-in-progress
> and not yet ready for public review is nevertheless deemed ready
> to be considered as a draft international standard.
Debbie at no point said that it was -- and it is not. It will be
December at the earliest that it can be registered as a CD, and it must
successfully complete a three-month ballot as CD before it can be
registered as a Draft International Standard. So last spring of 2006 at
the earliest.
This means that this debate is only to lock a _final_ ABNF via an
accepted RFC and a loaded operationalIANA registry _before_ a simpler
solution is available three months from now....
> > In other words, in the system as proposed, you could
> > use either the alpha-4 representation or the unique DI to find the
> > closest 639-1,-2,-3 or -5 tags should you so wish.
>
> But in language tags, either one value needs to be canonical -- sorry,
> "preferred" -- over the others, or else the duplicative values should
> not be added at all.
Your statement doesn't contradict anything that Debbie has said,
provided the context is ISO 639-6 alone. If we were to talk about
incorporation of ISO 639-6 into a revision of RFC 3066, however, then
duplication would become an issue for consideration.
This is the WG-ltru Charter that all the ISO codes be included. As a
user I am not much interested in mixing four formats only to please
Peter Constable and/or Debbie Garside. All the more than the issue is
the addition of the script information to document ... oral
expression and they miss computer(ised?) languages (definition?) and
all this is through computers.
For clarification of Debbie's statement, in the model of ISO 11179, we
have metadata elements that consist of a data element concept, such as
'English', and a representation for that, such as "en" or "eng" (these
would be distinct representations belonging to different value domains).
Within an metadata registry, a registry item corresponding to 'English'
can have a Data Identifier (DI), which is a unique identifier *within
the registry* for that administered item; in this example, that DI could
be any number of strings, though "English" would be among the better
choices.
Nice to see that ISO 11179 is accepted now. Peter Constable and the
WG-ltru have opposed the reference to ISO 11179 model. This model
permits to conceptualise languages and to include in their
description an unlimited number of additional elements. Roughly it
means that ISO 639-3 is a table of codes (names) related to non
documented languages. While ISO 639-6 wants to be a root to a base of
objects describing languages.
The Draft proposes a very limited version of that base with three
columns only. This is enough in many cases. But not in an increasing
number of cases. Hence the possibility to use the Draft as a default.
Since the three elements of the Draft's langtag are also in the
language object base. CLDR (Unicode locale project) is a langtag
related base. But ISO 11179 totally open the concept, like C
structures: data they may indefinitely expand as metadata. Each data
has the possibility to become a metadata describing a new dataset.
For example "fr-latn-FR" can use the three codes as data. This is the
case of the Draft.
Or it can use the ISO 639-1 "fr" data, as the meta data describing
all the French dialects and many new names to be listed (which are in
ISO 639-6). "Latn" element of ISO 15924 for Latin script can become a
meta data introducing French charset within a (to be defined) Latn
concept, and also include elements such as founts, thickness, color,
etc. etc. This is the approach I support: this is simple enough in
extending the DI concept in a network, but this has be to discussed
within ISO/TC 32 (or in a dedicated WG on reference centers?)
> Will Linguasphere provide the mapping between the new alpha-4 codes
> and ISO 639-1/2/3, or is that something a group like this would have to
do?
They will be (and must) providing that.
This insures full compatibility between all the visions using ISO
639-X codes (documented by the ISO 639-4 guidelines under work).
> I agree that the broad question of "what is a language" is out of our
> scope. The more specific question "what is a taggable language
> distinction" is perhaps more germane.
Not an unreasonable suggestion.
This is a major step ahead for common understanding!
My request, plea, begging, for a definition of what we intend to mean
as a "language" in the Draft contest, might after all be listen to.
I would then advise that the Draft is sent back to the WG-ltru, with
the suggestion that a lexicon is provided which would define what is
a "language", a "script", a "country", and the purpose (informative,
descriptive, normative?) of a langtag. This might be a big step ahead.
jfc
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