- From: Alain LaBont/e'/ <alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 18:06:15 -0500
- To: ietf-languages@uninett.no
- Cc: ietf-types@uninett.no, www-international@www10.w3.org, iso10646@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
At 08:44 1997-1-20 -0500, Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no wrote: >(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 Harald, If you have to choose 1 column, and I certainly support this idea, please use the second one. I would not like my Internet surname and trademark since almost a decade (alb) to be interpreted as "Albanian" (just joking, but I don't have to be explicit about the true reason behind my choice, you know my opinion about this already, it is internationally notorious since tens of centuries (: ). Alain LaBonté, alias alb in multilingual, equatorial-green and ultramodern Singapore (official languages: msa, zho, eng, +[tamoul/tamil, code tam?])
Received on Monday, 20 January 1997 18:04:23 UTC