Re: Click letters in ISO 639-3 and Registry (long)

ISO 639-3 accepted our proposed changes, which we discussed at some
length from February 27 to March 22 and ultimately agreed upon (see list
archives), and the revised ISO 639-3 data files were published on July
31.

I have begun to prepare registration forms to fix these in the Registry.
"Fix" mainly means removing the ASCII-hack Description fields for the
non-deprecated language subtags, and replacing the ASCII-hack
Description fields in the deprecated ones with proper spellings. This
includes replacing "=/Kx'au//'ein" with "ǂKxʼauǁʼein", as Mark
mentioned.

I have been unusually busy in the past few months and have not gotten
around to posting these changes to the ietf-languages list. There are
others, including two ISO 15924 additions and two new languages added to
ISO 639-3, that also need to be posted. I apologize for these delays. I
will post the forms this week; I'd hope that would mean "today" or
"tomorrow" but we'll see.

As you can see from the ǂKxʼauǁʼein example, some of the click
changes also brought apostrophe changes with them.

During the discussion of click letters, I suggested that it would be
overwhelming and contentious to try to evaluate every one of the
apostrophes and apostrophe-like characters in the Registry. There are
161 instances of U+0027, 1 instance of U+02BB, 4 instances of U+02BC,
and 3 instances of U+2019 in the current Registry. I wanted to focus
strictly on the language names that had click letters, and make any
clear and well-agreed-upon changes to apostrophes in those names while
we were at it, and not try to boil the entire apostrophe ocean with this
effort. I still believe that is the best course, If someone wants to go
through more than 160 apostrophe-like thingies and try to get consensus
for what each of them should be, let's make that its own project.

As I have said before, we are only concerned here with the names of
languages, in isolation, not with arbitrary text in those (or other)
languages surrounded by quotation marks or possessive apostrophes or the
like. So while it may be important to know the proper way to typeset
"Did he say 'I am learning Yanesha''?", it's not related to the current
effort of making these changes to the Registry.
 

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

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