On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Oh, please don't bring the langcom fights here, too :)
Fights? I don't see any :P
Both of you are right: on the one hand, ISO codes are often more political than linguistically correct. On the other hand, we don't have anything better, except making ad hoc decisions based on scientific articles about languages that most of us don't know. And this simply doesn't scale.
Can we do anything to improve the ISO 639 process?
We can. We can build the new infrastructure, which would include more careful work with language diversity. I see this group and the initiative in that direction. If JAC would be willing to use the benefits of our work, their process would be improved. If not, we'd have our process.