- From: <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 14:44:25 +0100
- To: ietf-languages@uninett.no
- cc: ietf-types@uninett.no, www-international@www10.w3.org, iso10646@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
(NOTE: This is being sent to 4 lists, in order to inform interested parties. Reply set to ietf-languages@uninett.no. Please respect it! This is a majordomo-maintained list; send to majordomo@uninett.no with SUBSCRIBE ietf-languages in the BODY to join) In my role as author and responsible maintainer for RFC 1766, I have now reviewed the ISO proposal for 3-letter language codes. The most interesting parts are: - It has 2 sets of codes for its 460-odd languages, which differ in 25 places (details below) - The sets are called "bibliographic" and "terminology" codes, and the "bibliographic" is mostly English-based codes, seemingly retained for backwards compatibility with installed applications - There are codes for groups of languages, like "Finno-ugric (Other)" - There are the special codes "mul" and "unk" for multiple and unknown languages, respectively - Spanish is treated specially: The doc gives "spa" in both columns, but a note that "esp" may be used for the terminology code after a period of 5 years. No explanation given, but an old tag for esperanto may be suspected. - It has been balloted in ISO/TC37/SC2 and ISO/TC46/SC4 France voted against in TC46/SC4. Germany voted against in TC37/SC2, but did not vote in TC46/SC4. Ireland voted against in TC46/SC4. USA voted against in TC37/SC2, but in favour in TC46/SC4. - There's a meeting in July of 1997 to resolve the comments (ISOspeak for revising the draft in light of ballot comments) My opinion is that we should not revise RFC 1766, "Tags for the identification of languages", the basis for the Content-language: header, to refer to this work until the final resolution of comments is done, and the document is published as an ISO standard. And then, if there are still 2 columns, RFC 1766 should refer to only ONE of them. Comments? Harald A APPENDIX: List of codes that differ in the 2 codespaces *Albanian alb sqi *Armenian arm hye *Basque baq eus *Burmese bur mya *Chinese chi zho *Croatian scr hrv *Czech cze ces *Dutch dut nld *French fre fra *Gaelic (Scots) gae gdh *Georgian geo kat *German ger deu *Greek, Modern (1453-)gre ell *Icelandic ice isl *Irish iri gai *Javanese jav jaw *Macedonian mac mkd *Malay may msa *Maori mao mri *Persian per fas *Romanian rum ron *Serbian scc srp *Slovak slo slk *Tibetan tib bod *Welsh wel cym
Received on Monday, 20 January 1997 08:44:45 UTC