[Foundation-l] Community draft of language proposal policy

Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
Fri Sep 5 17:05:42 UTC 2008


Hoi,
On Meta you replaced the ISO-639-3 requirement with an RFC 4646 requirement.
These  things are incompatible. From a language point of view one, the ISO
code is about languages the other is not. So when you say that we can be
ahead of the game, you should not go backwards to the RFC and consider this
"best practice" indeed a best practice. For us it is not. It does not even
address the issues that we deal with as the RFC does occupy itself with
dialects and orthographies something that we explicitly do not.

Yes, we have been ahead of the standards bodies, we adopted the ISO-639-3
before it was confirmed as a standard. I am involved in the ISO-639-6 and
this is at least five years ahead to what would be considered a BCP.  The
issue is in what makes sense; when people want to write in a dead language,
they are welcome to it. HOWEVER, it has to be clear that what is written in
a modern incarnation of a dead language is not the dead language itself.


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