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Subject: Re: [geolang-comment] First proposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available


Lars Marius Garshol scripsit:

> (John sent this to me privately, but as I don't think that was
> intentional I'm replying to the list.)

It was not.  Thanks.

> That is a good point. The trouble is that if you apply this heuristic
> you come to conclusions that don't actually make any sense.

That assumes that the people who wrote 639 were idiots.  I prefer to assume
that what they say makes sense in their own context.

> The first
> problem is that this would conclude that 'mul' and 'und' represent
> languages, which they do not.

Distinguo.   The text says that names containing the strings "languages"
or "(other)" are collectives; it does not go so far as to say that
names not containing those strings are necessarily individual languages.
I think we can assert our judgment sufficiently to not assert the
languagehood of "mul" and "und", given the plain meaning of the standard.

> Secondly, 'nor' would be a single
> language, even though according to 639 itself Norwegian can be split
> into 'nno' and 'nob'.

What's wrong with that?  If I say "Lars is speaking Norwegian", do
you think that necessarily means "(Lars is speaking Bokmal) or
(Lars is speaking Nynorsk)" given that these are written standards
anyway?  English has several written standards, but we do not call
it a collective language.   (Admittedly, B and N are far more different
from each other than any kind of written E. from any other kind.)

> Another problem is 'Chinese' (chi). It's not clear which language this
> is supposed to be, and the Ethnologue mapping splits it into 12
> different languages. 

But what that means is that the Ethnologue's standard (mutual
unintelligibility of the spoken language) is quite different from 639's.
For bibliographical purposes, there *is* only one Chinese language.

> and so it's tempting to conclude that that is a language group, too.

There is no problem with conclusing that, but *not* in a topic map
that is mirroring 639.

> In other words, we could interpret the text as you write, and I think
> that might even be the intended interpretation, but it leads us into
> all manner of controversies that I would prefer not to have in the
> published subject set itself.

No, it does not lead us into controversies as such.  Attempting to
"correct" the standard, that would be controversial.  Mirroring the
standard is just that: if there are errors in it, it is not our place
nor our problem to fix them.

> Instead, I could publish my Ethnologue-based type assignments as an
> individual, and you could publish your assignments based on the 4.1.1
> heuristic, and people could use whichever they preferred.

Except that 4.1.1 is *part* of the standard we are representing.  SO
the topic "language" is really "language according to 639".
If you want to assert that chi maps to 12 languages, you are using
language in a different sense = a different topic.

-- 
John Cowan                                   jcowan@reutershealth.com
        "You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
                --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know


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