Rebecca

1. Regardless of the pros and cons of the points made by Joan Benet
Rodríguez Manzanares, PLEASE do not sent large attachments (943123
bytes is what reached me). Please place it on a website, and give us
the URL.

Large attachments can completely obliterate the available bandwidth:
I'm working away from my normal office, and attachments like this can
cause mayhem with various dialup restrictions.

2. On Joan Benet Rodríguez Manzanares' paper, the main issues seem to
be about orthography (and indeed these are well attested, and
generally convincing arguments, though it would help if the English
was clearer.

It doesn't say anything about the status of Valencian being other
than a dialect. It has additional lexical items, and some different
grammatical constructions, in comparison to Barcelona Catalan, but
what self-respecting dialect wouldn't?

I note that the Ethnologue describes the language as
Catalan-Balearic-Valencian (which sounds like hedging one's bets, and
isn't a neat language name).

However, there is no suggestion from that, that Valencian would be a
language in ISO 639-3, though it might receive a dialect code in one
of the later parts of ISO 639, if/when that gets developed.

3. Nor, therefore, should ISO 639-2 list Valencian as a language name.

There also needs to be come consideration given as to the operational
relationship between maintenance of ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-2, just as
the JAC provides an operational relationship between maintenance of
ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-1.

Best regards

John Clews

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