> From: ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Milicent K Wewerka

> I thought we had resolved the issues with Bihari and Himachali some
> time
> ago. We were going to treat them as collective entities. Himachali
> would be equivalent to Western Pahari. The only peculiarity for Bihari
> is that it is included in ISO639-1 which doesn't include collective
> terms.

That is, isn't *designed* and intended to include collections. We can't really ignore what Bihari really is. It seems to me our options are:

- we say that bh/bih really is a collection and that 639-1 has that anomalous case, or
- we say that Bihari is a collection and exclude it from 639-1 as being out of scope for that code, or
- we use the macrolanguage escape hatch to say that in 639-1 applications it is considered an individual language while in 639-2/-3 applications it is considered multiple language, or
- we can ignore the issue and leave it unresolved

I don't like the last of these: it just passes the problem of inconsistency in our code set on to the users of our standards.



Peter