I would vote for the first. After doing all the analysis that has been
done over the last few years as a result of the development of 639-3 we
have discovered some anomalies and inconsistencies. I wouldn't favor
excluding it from 639-1. I don't mind the third one, but I agree the
fourth one is not desirable.

Rebecca

On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Peter Constable wrote:

> > 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
>