On May 18, 2017, at 2:42 PM, Oliver Stegen
<oliver_stegen(a)sil.org> wrote:
For the record:
I'm opposed to changing arn to qmp for the reasons given by Gerard and Michael
already.
Otherwise, I have no time to follow the unacceptable exchanges. I do expect appropriate
apologies from Milos.
For now, I will remain silent on LangCom until proper behaviour has returned.
Oliver
On 18-May-17 13:43, Michael Everson wrote:
On 17 May 2017, at 22:14, Milos Rancic
<millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is response to Oliver, as well.
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:30 PM, Karen Broome <klbroome(a)pacbell.net> wrote:
I agree that pressuring the JAC to adopt a less
offensive code is futile. There are national libraries and government-funded software
systems that use these codes that cannot be updated in any kind of timely way. Lots of
countries would like representations that more closely resemble the native language names.
I can’t remember the issue, but I have been up against something like this before and gave
up, as interop and compatibility with legacy systems was paramount. 639-2 codes are not
likely to change for that reason.
Here is the background of the story…
Some
of us were actually there.
This is not about "closer
representation", but about replacing the code based on *offensive* language name.
What about code stability in a widespread international standard?
Replacing code names because of more trivial (and
racist reasons, BTW) have happened in at least in the case of ROM=>RON change.
When do you think that change was made? What evidence do you have for it?
In 1996, a ballot went out where some language codess were changed. The ballot had gd
gae/gdh for Scottish Gaelic, ga iri/gai for Irish, and nothing for Manx. Ireland lobbied
for gd/gla, ga/gle, and gv/glv which were accepted. On that ballot at that time the codes
for Romanian were already rum/ron. 1996. TWENTY YEARS AGO.
(Poor Romanians were offended because the code
had a meaning of a member of Roma ethnicity.)
ROM is now used in ISO 639 as a
macrolanguage term for the Romany languages.
Allowing a racist-based change requested by white
people
Kindly stop this racist bullshit. The very concept of “white” vs “non-white”
is largely meaningless in South America, compared to the use of those categories in North
America. In Europe we do not share the baggage that they do in the United States, and
encouraging it as you are doing is not constructive.
The correct terms to use are “endonym” and “exonym”. You maintain that at least some
Mapuche dislike an exonym so much that they refuse to use a Wikipedia prefixed with “arn”.
They live in Chile, right? In a region called Araucanía. They may call it something else
in their language, but it would appear that this term would be widespread and visible
everywhere.
and not allowing offensive-name-based change by
indigenous people is a typical institutional racist behavior, no matter of particular
excuse
What about code stability in a widespread international standard?
I know there are always pretty valid excuses as
long as it's not about interests and money of white people.
This has nothing to
do with melanin content of human beings of indigenous and European extraction in Chile.
We could, for example, see that in relation to
not fixing many scripts inside of Unicode because of "reasons", while adding
tons of nonsense emoticons afterwards because
"it's cool”.
Whatever are you on about? “Fixing” scripts implies that
some are “broken”. The addition of characters of all kinds proceeds every year. I just got
84 characters approved for Fairy Chess, an important intellectual activity to some
humans.
Please note that ISO/IEC 10646 and ISO 639 are unrelated standards.
It is not about ISO 639-2, but about ISO 639-3.
We are using ISO 639-3 codes. If there is the rule which fixes ISO 639-3 to ISO 639-2,
I don’t think you understand the relation between the standards. Firstly, ISO 639-2
is essentially fixed and frozen. No additional codes are to be added to it. This is for
stability of the code set, which is implemented in billions of devices worldwide.
that’s definitely unfortunate and requires
changes of the rules inside of JAC to avoid widespread institutional racism.
Stop
using this terminology. Clearly you don’t know how to do so.
A note to Oliver: First, thank you for really
reading the document and finding the relevant part.
You might thank him too for
pointing out your error.
At the other side, can we or not JAC's and
Unicode's behavior
Unicode has NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH THIS.
put under the definition "The collective
failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people
because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in
processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting
prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority
ethnic people.”?
Their language has been recognized and given a three-letter
identifier which serves to identify texts written for the benefit of the 260,000 native
speakers.
If *you* think not, please send me a private
email with the reasons. I would be happy to be convinced by you in opposite and will
apologize here. If convinced, will do that partially for JAC, as well, because I think
that it's not possible to defend Unicode's institutional racism.
Miloš
Rančić, I hereby request an immediate formal apology from you right now, here, in public,
for having attacked the Unicode Consortium as perpetrating “institutional racism”. The
Unicode Consortium, along with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2, maintains the Universal Character Set,
known as the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. This standard has nothing whatever to do
with the language codes of ISO 639.
It appears to me that you do not understand the development of these international
standards.
Michael Everson
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