On 9 Oct 2013, at 08:05, David Dalby <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> After 15 years of this alignment, is it not now appropriate for our JAC to review this "joint" enterprise, and to reflect on whether it would be appropriate at least to discuss the possible separation of an (independent ISO) system of 2-letter codes for specific "written languages" (to be defined) and a (MARC + SIL) system of 3-letter codes to cover an open list of all known named "languages", present and past ?
What, and cause another forking and duplication? No, please, no.
Even now I have a terrible time as a publisher working with LightningSource and Ingrams which use some sort of subset of ISO 639, but who complained to me that my books are tagged "iri" and not "gle". But I don't tag them; it is the internals of their popup menu which do that. And I have lots of books in dialects with 3-digit codes, but those are not in the popup lists. And Amazon does't admit but a subset of 639 codes either.
> If he were still alive, what opinion on this question might be expressed by Eugen Wüster ?
Would you like to explain this?
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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