[Standards] recommendation on glottolog codes?

[Penny Labropoulou]

Dear Piotr, Dieter and all,
Since we are talking about language standards, I would recommend also checking the BCP 47 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47), which concatenates the use of ISO 639 (but favours ISO 639-1 and resorts to 639-3 if there's no code for the language in question) with script, region and variant codes. I see it more and more in use by various researchers and projects.
Having said that, since there is a one-to-one mapping between these values, there shouldn't be a problem. For those languages that have a code only in glottology, of course, glottology should be recommended.
Best,
Penny

-----Original Message-----
From: standards-bounces at lists.clarin.eu [mailto:standards-bounces at lists.clarin.eu] On Behalf Of Piotr Banski
Sent: Friday, May 5, 2017 11:43 AM
To: Dieter Van Uytvanck <dieter at clarin.eu>; standards at lists.clarin.eu
Subject: Re: [Standards] recommendation on glottolog codes?

Dear Dieter and all,

Thanks for this, it's going to be a nice use case for entering a new proposal onto the standards chart.
With the evaluation of our Institute ending today, I can now switch to my commitments towards the CSC again and the list will be hearing from me on this soon.

Now, turning to the matter at hand directly. With both the name of Martin Haspelmath and institutions such as SIL International and MPI Jena in the background, and given the scale of the work behind Glottolog, I personally share Dieter's sentiment, although as a Committee, I guess we should better use a documented process for that, and in the best of worlds, I would love to see that process pushed onto ISO, and us giving a stamp of approval to a proposal that would already be part of an ISO track (even if it were in the early stages of the ISO process, with all the question marks entailed by that). With my ISO hat on, I just can't imagine that no ISO activity would be taking place in this regard, unless TC37 SC2 is in deep slumber.

@Committee: Do we have anyone here with a direct channel to TC37 SC2 open, please?

@Dieter: would you be willing to share the use case that prompted the question? Or was it just general musing, given the existence of Glottolog?

I will probe my SC3 and SC4 contacts in the meantime. One way or another, I find the question inspiring in more than one respect, definitely a good argument for a dynamic system that we have talked about in Aix. And hopefully a live example of it, too.

Best regards,

   Piotr




On 05/04/17 18:05, Dieter Van Uytvanck wrote:
> Dear standards committee,
>
> I was recently asked what the status of the glottolog language codes
> (http://glottolog.org/glottolog/language) are within CLARIN.
>
> They seem to be well-endorsed by many researchers, especially in the 
> field of (non-western) language documentation.
>
> Especially in those cases where there is no ISO-639-3 code, I suppose 
> these can be recommended?
>
> Thanks for your opinion on this!
>
> best regards,


--
Piotr Bański, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher,
Institut für Deutsche Sprache,
R5 6-13
68-161 Mannheim, Germany

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