On 17 May 2017, at 22:14, Milos Rancic <[email protected]> wrote:
This is response to Oliver, as well.
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:30 PM, Karen Broome <[email protected]> wrote:
I agree that pressuring the JAC to adopt a less offensive code is futile. There
are national libraries and government-funded software systems that use these
codes that cannot be updated in any kind of timely way. Lots of countries would
like representations that more closely resemble the native language names. I
can’t remember the issue, but I have been up against something like this before
and gave up, as interop and compatibility with legacy systems was paramount.
639-2 codes are not likely to change for that reason.
Here is the background of the story…
Some of us were actually there.
This is not about "closer representation", but about replacing the code based
on *offensive* language name.
What about code stability in a widespread international standard?
Replacing code names because of more trivial (and racist reasons, BTW) have
happened in at least in the case of ROM=>RON change.
When do you think that change was made? What evidence do you have for it?
In 1996, a ballot went out where some language codess were changed. The ballot
had gd gae/gdh for Scottish Gaelic, ga iri/gai for Irish, and nothing for Manx.
Ireland lobbied for gd/gla, ga/gle, and gv/glv which were accepted. On that
ballot at that time the codes for Romanian were already rum/ron. 1996. TWENTY
YEARS AGO.
(Poor Romanians were offended because the code had a meaning of a member of
Roma ethnicity.)
ROM is now used in ISO 639 as a macrolanguage term for the Romany languages.
Allowing a racist-based change requested by white people
Kindly stop this racist bullshit. The very concept of “white” vs “non-white” is
largely meaningless in South America, compared to the use of those categories
in North America. In Europe we do not share the baggage that they do in the
United States, and encouraging it as you are doing is not constructive.
The correct terms to use are “endonym” and “exonym”. You maintain that at least
some Mapuche dislike an exonym so much that they refuse to use a Wikipedia
prefixed with “arn”. They live in Chile, right? In a region called Araucanía.
They may call it something else in their language, but it would appear that
this term would be widespread and visible everywhere.
and not allowing offensive-name-based change by indigenous people is a typical
institutional racist behavior, no matter of particular excuse
What about code stability in a widespread international standard?
I know there are always pretty valid excuses as long as it's not about
interests and money of white people.
This has nothing to do with melanin content of human beings of indigenous and
European extraction in Chile.
We could, for example, see that in relation to not fixing many scripts inside of Unicode
because of "reasons", while adding tons of nonsense emoticons afterwards because
"it's cool”.
Whatever are you on about? “Fixing” scripts implies that some are “broken”. The
addition of characters of all kinds proceeds every year. I just got 84
characters approved for Fairy Chess, an important intellectual activity to some
humans.
Please note that ISO/IEC 10646 and ISO 639 are unrelated standards.
It is not about ISO 639-2, but about ISO 639-3. We are using ISO 639-3 codes.
If there is the rule which fixes ISO 639-3 to ISO 639-2,
I don’t think you understand the relation between the standards. Firstly, ISO
639-2 is essentially fixed and frozen. No additional codes are to be added to
it. This is for stability of the code set, which is implemented in billions of
devices worldwide.
that’s definitely unfortunate and requires changes of the rules inside of JAC
to avoid widespread institutional racism.
Stop using this terminology. Clearly you don’t know how to do so.
A note to Oliver: First, thank you for really reading the document and finding
the relevant part.
You might thank him too for pointing out your error.
At the other side, can we or not JAC's and Unicode's behavior
Unicode has NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH THIS.
put under the definition "The collective failure of an organisation to provide
an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture,
or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour
which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance,
thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”?
Their language has been recognized and given a three-letter identifier which
serves to identify texts written for the benefit of the 260,000 native speakers.
If *you* think not, please send me a private email with the reasons. I would be
happy to be convinced by you in opposite and will apologize here. If convinced,
will do that partially for JAC, as well, because I think that it's not possible
to defend Unicode's institutional racism.
Miloš Rančić, I hereby request an immediate formal apology from you right now,
here, in public, for having attacked the Unicode Consortium as perpetrating
“institutional racism”. The Unicode Consortium, along with ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2,
maintains the Universal Character Set, known as the Unicode Standard and
ISO/IEC 10646. This standard has nothing whatever to do with the language codes
of ISO 639.
It appears to me that you do not understand the development of these
international standards.
Michael Everson
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