[tei-council] TEI and ISO 639-6

[Lou Burnard]

I met the lady mentioned as the source of this rumour at an ISO meeting 
somewhere last year (Jeju?  Lisbon? it's all a blur)  and had a brief 
conversation with her about the TEI's proposals on language 
identification, mentioning in particular Christian's name as the head 
of the relevant TEI  work group and the fact that we were adopting an 
ISDO multipart identifier approach. As is my wont I also doubtless made 
warm and encouraging noises about the TEI always being willing to work 
with other communities and steal those ideas which we liked. I then 
participated in a meeting of the ISO workgroup concerned (SC4/WG2 I 
think?) and witnessed at first hand the awful mess which is ISO 639-6 
at present. To my partially-informed eye, the proposals coming out of 
the Linguasphere lobby (which was heavily represented at this meeting) 
looked  inappropriate for TEI use (or any one else's really); a point 
which I made in the meeting. I was also struck by the very unseemly way 
in which the politics of the meeting were handled. So, I agree with 
Laurent, this is a can of worms we should keep our nose out of. 
(Irrelevant linguistic note for Laurent:  if you "stand by" you are 
usually holding back from action but expecting to receive orders to 
proceed at short notice: cf "back up"; I think a better idiom here 
would be that we recommend a  "stand off" or "hands off" position)

Lou (just back from Croatia and catching up on email)


On 26 May 2005, at 23:56, Christian Wittern wrote:

> Laurent.Romary at loria.fr writes:
>
>> I do hope it is not related to the fact that we have regular 
>> exchanges in the
>> ISO framework, since I personally do not remember making the link 
>> with the TEI.
>> There are several ongoing projects related to further parts of ISO 
>> 639, and the
>> difficulties to reconcile the Ethnologue and Linguasphere groups (to 
>> simplify
>> the matter) would make me suggest to adopt a stand-by position 
>> regarding the
>> topic.
>
> Thanks Laurent.  It thus seems that somebody tries to capitalize on a
> non-existing link with the TEI.  If nothing else, it proves at least
> that the TEI seems to be thought of as heavy enought to be used in
> such a manouever.
>
> All the best,
>
> Christian
>
>
> -- 
>
>  Christian Wittern
>  Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
>  47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN
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