Talk:ISO 639-3

message: would like to write about ISO 639 three letter adoption.
;non-conforming
*http://airberlin.com/ uses ces->cze, hun->ung, nld->net ; while deu eng spa fra ita pol por are ISO conform
Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Lots of people use nonconforming codes. Even when they try to adopt ISO codes, they make up codes like pob for Brazilian Portuguese, which is just a dialect. (Of course, so are the variants of Serbocroatian that get their own language codes for purely political reasons.) Many, many people don't even know the difference between a language and a country and use country codes. The horror. And don't even try to evangelize them, it's useless.--87.162.30.226 06:58, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adoption 

message: This linux one-liner generates the mapping:
 (echo "iso_639_map_1_3 = {"; wget -O - http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/iso-639-3_Latin1_20070516.tab | cut -f 1,4 | sed -e "1,1d" | grep "......" | awk "{print \"    '\" \$2 \"' : '\" \$1 \"',\"}" | sort; echo "}") > iso_639_map_1_3.py 
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.56.104.89 (talk) 19:37, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mapping ISO 639-1 to ISO 639-3 

message: It would be helpful to have a paragraph discussing the fact that the standard is not static, but dynamic, and how one might go about proposing changes to it (through the ISO 639-3 registration authority).
- Albert Bickford 206.169.90.53 (talk) 23:24, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.186.204.191 (talk) 07:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Procedure for making changes to the ISO 639-3 standard 

message: Since we're talking standards, what the heck is "2007-02-05" supposed to mean?  I get the 2007 bit.  But the rest could be 2 May or 5 February.  Totally ambiguous and therefore totally unacceptable for an encyclopedia.  --  Jack of Oz  ... speak! ...  20:27, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: When the year is given first in a date, with two-digit month and year, as in "2014-05-18", it is generally done for the purpose of sorting dates with simple algorithms.  That purpose demands that the month be given first, then the day.  I've personally never seen dates in the form yyyy-dd-mm, and would be very surprised to see them.  Therefore, one can safely assume that 2007-02-05 is 5 February, not 2 May.  I'd also note that this format is accepted in the Wikipedia manual of style []. AlbertBickford (talk) 01:23, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Speaking of standards, the YYYY-MM-DD format conforms to ISO 8601. So, not completely ambiguous. Pconstable (talk) 20:05, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Date

message: The article says: "It is a superset of ISO 639-1".
Since all the actual codes are different, it seems more correct to me to say: "The list of languages covered by ISO 639-3 is a superset of the list of languages covered by ISO 639-1".
Or is it too anal? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:48, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the wording should be more precise, so reworded it. AlbertBickford (talk) 01:27, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  A superset of ISO 639-1 

message: In the list of permitted changes, I changed "removed" to "deprecated": for purposes of stability, entries in 639-3 are never removed. The registration authority talks about "retirement" (unfortunately, since that is somewhat ambiguous), but the actual text of the standard does not use that term: it uses "deprecation". Pconstable (talk) 16:48, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maintenance processes 

message: Minnan is a chinese language, a medieval chinese one, that is one of the ancestor of todaay mandarin or cantonese, so 639-1 should be zh.82.225.234.108 (talk) 09:36, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Minnan is a group of modern Chinese varieties, not an ancestor of other modern varieties.  In any case, this article should report what ISO 639-3 says, not try to correct it.  Kanguole 09:43, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's already corrected following ISO 639-3 say, there was nothing, in 639/639-2, that was false statement. That's a modern chinese variety, but generaly classed as medieval chinese.82.225.234.108 (talk) 08:22, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This is off-topic for an article about ISO 639-3, but a claim that a modern variety is classified as medieval Chinese makes no sense.  Kanguole 10:24, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minnan 

message: I don't understand how a select group of people can decide whether any random language is a language or not. How can they for example decide that those speaking Montenegrin aren't actually speaking a language while their own government calls it one! How can the West accept such an un democratic organization...?--Michael (talk) 20:48, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You are quite right, you don't understand.  The ISO 639-3 is not a dictatorship, but a consensus opinion among interested scholars.  Its use is primarily for library and internet referencing software to track bibliography, collections, etc.  And its use is by no means mandatory.  In the US, for example, NSF and NEH funding for language-related projects use it for identifying and tracking language research funding.  You somehow think this is more than it actually is.  Take your tin hat off and go out to look at the fall colors.  There's nothing to see here.  --Taivo (talk) 23:01, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Not many autumn colones here yet, but I'll take my hat off anyway.--Michael (talk) 11:47, 16 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  I don't understand 

message: I have noticed that all the links to PDFs in the main page and in the talk page are dead. It seems that some time ago that the physical location of the linguistlist servers changed. when this happened lots of the older features on the linguist list servers ceased to exist. I don't know if the content is in the internet archive or not.
The following items in the further reading section no-longer are correctly linked. Perhaps the SSILA has another server now?
* Aristar, Anthony (2006). "ISO standardized language codes and the Ethnologue". SSILA Bulletin 247.
* Epps, Patience, et al (2006). "In opposition to adopting Ethnologue's language codes for ISO 639-3". SSILA Bulletin 246.
* Golla, Victor, ed. (2006). "SSILA statement on ISO 639-3 language codes". SSILA Bulletin 249.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hugh Paterson III (talk • contribs) 05:52, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead Links 

message: I was reading the talk section above about criticisms, in particular the discussion about Nora England's revisions. I am not an expert in Mayan languages so I am not critiquing her suggestions, but I am asking a process question. How does the ISO handle language mergers? Not just code mergers. Let's say that some daughter languages of historical ancestry are evaluated and they have a low intelligibility score (a classic litmus test for differentiating languages), therefore they are argued to be independent an each assigned and ISO 639-3 code. Then, something happens so that "Bi-dialecticalism" or "bi-lingualism" occurs - say a road is built so that population movement and contact increases. Then another researcher comes along and notices that the languages are no-longer "independent" or that mutual intelligibility has risen or that "leveling" has occurred. Then the new researcher reports these findings, saying that the previous language assessment was in error.  If the ISO committee accepts the proposal usually what happens is that the old codes are retired. However, why is it that those codes are retired, rather than pointing to a different era in the history of the language? There are codes in the code set which point to historical states of a language i.e. Old High German, or Old English. If I am asking this question then perhaps the question and the answer should be part of the main page? Hugh Paterson III (talk) 06:55, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Change management in the ISO with regard to variation leveling

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on ISO 639-3. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050405005828/http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/GetListOfAncientLgs.html to http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/GetListOfAncientLgs.html
*Added  tag to http://eikenes.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-November/001589.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:08, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I replaced the text with "eng" and it brought me to a disambiguation page. If you have to leave the text in the search box, would it be possible to make the text hidden somehow and automatically added?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Akeosnhaoe (talk • contribs) 03:36, 21 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Make the text in the search box non-deletable 

message: http://www.kreativekorp.com/clcr/index.php
2A02:1812:D29:7200:50EA:EB44:BF91:2C83 (talk) 15:20, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about conlangs ? there is an initiative online for using the q-- codes