Re: Registration requests: akuapem, asante

What I find most ironic in this case is that "tw" was coded in ISO 639:1988, and "ak" was added to ISO 639-1 in 1999. (The first edition of ISO 639-2 was published in 1998, and the first edition of ISO 639-1 was published in 2002, so it appears that "ak" was added to 639-2 while 639-1 was still in ballot.) At that point, 639-2 had a requirement that the language must be used in at least 50 documents across one to five agencies; and 639-1 had further requirements relating to use in technical documentation and terminologies. Yet in 2017 it's unclear what usage there is. 

I'm left wondering: how did "tw" get added to ISO 639:1988? 

(I've wondered since I first starting working on ISO 639 over 15 years ago how ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 ended up with both ak/aka and tw/twi.)


Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Ietf-languages [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 3:50 PM
To: Don Osborn <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Cc: 'Michael Everson' <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Registration requests: akuapem, asante

Don Osborn wrote:

> There is a unified orthography for Akan. What does that mean when, 
> say, Twi Asante, Twi Akuapem, and Fante (which from all descriptions 
> are mutually intelligible) are written in it? One might refer simply 
> to writing Akan (ak)? Or would new subtags for the unified orthography 
> in question reference it under tw or fat?

Well, again, it really comes down to current practice. If there is no current practice to speak of -- if Twi and Fanti and unified-orthography Akan aren't being tagged at present, or if tagging is all over the place -- then we are in a position to encourage a best practice. A reasonable solution might be:

ak - for unified-orthography Akan¹
tw-akuapem - for Akuapem Twi
tw-asante - for Asante² Twi
fat - for Fanti²

¹ if it really is distinct from Twi and Fanti per se ² pick your favorite spelling

If there *is* an existing practice for tagging these languages (without the Twi-disambiguation variants, of course), then we ought to honor that and apply the new variants to the subtag(s) that is/are currently used for Twi. But again, someone needs to speak up and offer some evidence of the existing practice, or else we have no way of knowing.

> This is why, in addition to clearer documentation on usage (for 
> instance on Wikipedia), involvement of experts in the language(s) in 
> question would be helpful. Not intending that as a criticism, but an 
> observation.

Yes, this is always something to strive for when proposing a subtag, especially variant subtags for a living language with 9 million speakers (WP).

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org 

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