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Re: [ga] Re: IDN.IDN wikipedia, out of my league


At 08:49 14/04/2006, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 06:55:07PM +0200,
 JFC Morfin <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
 a message of 118 lines which said:

> It supports an interesting possibility: to tag a limited number of
> languages (around 250 ...  over 30.000 language units the world
> actually counts)

I don't have the time to fix every lie in the world but, on this
matter, I have some knowledge and I wish to emphasize that the
*initial* languages registry (it will be extended in the future)
already has 535 languages, from Afar to Zuni.

See it at: http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry

Dear Stephane,
It is very sad, while you are so good on technical issues you know, you hurt your image in being so poor with people.


Let stay technical. At least I tried it, in my explanation to Simon, so he could use it in his Wikipedia text (I suggest him to send it to both of us for fair review). This is a matter you have some knowledge. This is a matter where I suppose I have referential competence.

I certainly understand this is also a subjective matter where you can have strong feelings against me for my winning "weak to strong" global and IETF strategy. This matter certainly concerns the world peace, economy and policy. There are two main positions: the US/Unicode globalization [you supported openly against me] and the multilingualisation now demanded by the rest of the world (WSIS), France was long the proponent. But a consensus has been found in a few hours on a mid-November day: the Tunis deal and the RFC 3066 Bis IESG approval. It certainly serves my purposes better than yours. But it was the US/Unicode demand. I continue to work to protect interoperability and to prevent balkanization. You and everyone is welcome to join.

I have four technical comment on your mail. I hope they help you, as your blog helped me in other areas.

1. Simon can use my inputs. You are an applied IDN expert. When reviewing my mail, your point of contention is outside of IDN issues.

2. you disagree with my generous "250" figure. What is discussed is the interest of the Unicode proposition, not the IANA registry I publicly approved. It currently concerns (http://unicode.org/cldr/apps/survey/) 148 locale files, representing 128 languages. I have no doubt that at the end of the day Unicode may come-up with my guesstimate of 300 locale files/ 250 languages. The difference between Unicode and me on this issue is not technical. Unicode wants to constrain the number of supported languages to its ability to maintain locale files. I want to extend the locale file number to the number of lingual communities, empowering each community to control its own locale information.

3. I am please that you support IANA Registry extension. But how? As Languages or as Extensions? New languages call for an RFC 3066 ter. It seems explicitly nobody is eager to engage into it any time soon. We know it would favor a multilateral vision of the Internet, the US policy does not support, however it is the much pressing alternative to the balkanization they lead us to.

4. IRT your "535" figure, I will certainly not call it a "lie". This is your position. Since, for me, this is US/Unicode internal stuff, the best I can offer is to refer Simon to the Unicode horse's mouth.

- Mark Davis is the Unicode President. He is ex-IBM Globalization and now in charge at Google. He is the co-author of RFC 3066 Bis.
- Harald Alvestrand, former IETF Chair and owner of the ietf-languages@xxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list, is a Member of the Unicode BoD.
- Martin Duërst co-chair of the WG-LTRU which produced the RFC 3066 Bis is a Member of Unicode.
- Michael Everson, author of the ISO 15924 scripts name list is the Language Tags Reviewer for who the ietf-languages@xxxxxxxxxxxxx list exists (his claim on IETF main).
- Addison Philips is W3C Internationalisation WG Chair, co-author of RFC 3066 Bis and responsible of this area for Yahoo!
- Doug Ewell is a Member of Unicode who authored the registry you quote.
- Scott Carpenter, an employee of Verisign a Member of Unicode, was the concerned AD.
- Brian Carpenter is the Chair of the IESG which approved (and confirmed against a clarifying appeal of mine) the RFC 3066 Bis and delays its application on the key reviewing issue. He is an employee of IBM, Member of Unicode.
- the key person in all this is Peter Constable, ex-SIL and an employee of Microsoft (a leading member of the Unicode consortium). He is the author of the ISO 639-3 Draft and an active participant to the ietf-languages@xxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list.


All these people are IETF acknowledged experts.They carry the serious professional or community responsibilities, I quoted.They are authoritative for their own proposition. All of them share in the ietf-languages@xxxxxxxxxxxxx debate. The best contribution I can do is the following ietf-languages@xxxxxxxxxxxxx thread on the matter.

At 23:16 25/03/2006, Mark Davis wrote:
At 08:27 25/03/2006, Doug Ewell wrote:
Mark Davis wrote:
BTW, with the current registry we are now up to a total of  49,456,795
possible valid language tags, not counting variants. (If we count
variants, then the number is unlimited, since there can be arbitrarily
many suffixed variants).

Subtag    Count
grandfathered    34
language    1,006
redundant    59
region    320
script    153
variant    4
LT Count    49,456,795

How did you arrive at these counts? I got 487 languages, 104 scripts, 282 regions.

You may have been filtering out some codes, like private use. Here is the list I extract.

<I removed the count of scripts and regions>

1    language    aa
2    language    ab
3    language    ae
4    language    af

(I remove a few out of respect to the member of the list)

1000    language    yap
1001    language    ypk
1002    language    zap
1003    language    zen
1004    language    znd
1005    language    zun
1006    language    zxx
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