I find it outrageously narrow-minded that the Chileans won't accept a Wikipedia in Mapudungun because they find the code offensive. So, they care more about the code than having a Wikipedia? Come on..if they disagree with the code, present their case to the JAC or whoever takes care of that. We should not waste our resources in doing something they have refused to do themselves. As a speaker of two minority languages, one of them aboriginal, I can't care less about the code as long as we have the wiki, and I have discussed the subject with my Wayuunaiki-speaking friends, and they dislike "guc", because is a name imposed by the Spaniards, but they can live with it. The code LAD is used for Ladino, but we don't use that name in the language, we use Djudeo-Espanyol or simply Espanyol, and we can still live with it despite the other name ignores the North African dialects.
I oppose using movement resources to request something that is neither our responsibility, nor is a mature request.
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----- Reply message ----- From: "Oliver Stegen" oliver_stegen@sil.org To: langcom@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Langcom] Notes from the Berlin meeting Date: Fri, May 19, 2017 12:42 AM
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@gmail.com wrote:
This is response to Oliver, as well.
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:30 PM, Karen Broome klbroome@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.
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