[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Handling ISO 639-3?

[Christian Perrier]

Hello fellow co-maintainers,

Today, I was looing at ISO 639-3 as of
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp

As far as I see, our list is correct and complete....however, the ISO
639-3 MA site uses constructions like "Moroccan Arabic" while we have
"Arabic, Moroccan spoken" in our iso_639_3.xml file.


There are numerous such examples, however some parts of the ISO-639-3
MA show that "Arabic, Moroccan spoken" is another possible form. This is
for instance the one used in Ethnologue....

One is called the "print form", aka "Moroccan Arabic". Another is the
"inverted form" which makes easier to sort language families, namely
"Arabic, Moroccan spoken".


I think we should indeed provide both forms in our XML file:

	<iso_639_3_entry
		id="ary"
		scope="I"
		type="L"
		name="Moroccan Arabic"
		inverted_name="Arabic, Moroccan Spoken" />

This could be done by combining both files:

http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/iso-fdis-639-3_20061114.tab
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/iso-fdis-639-3_Name_Index_20061114.tab

Do you guys think that this could be automated ?

I think that Alastair got the file we have directly from the first of
these two files.....

PS: if there is some script that is able to update our XML file from
the TAB file available on the ISO-639-3 MA site, we should probably
provide it along with our package.


-- 


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-isocodes-devel/attachments/20061224/c34f959c/attachment.pgp