Conflicts between language system tags

[Levantovsky, Vladimir]

Dear all,

In the process of editing the working draft to accommodate the recent changes I ran into a number of conflicts when some newly proposed language entries and language system tags conflict with the existing values. These conflicts stem from the fact that the original OpenType language system tags were assigned without referencing the ISO spec and are "grandfathered" into the existing standard. For example, these conflicts include:

-          proposed addition of "Kabyle" language with the language tag 'KAB' (ISO tag 'kab') that has earlier been assigned to "Kabardian";

-          proposed addition of "Papiamentu" language with the language tag 'PAP' (ISO tag 'pap') that has earlier been assigned to "Palpa";

-          proposed addition of "Ripuarian" language with the language tag 'KSH' (ISO tag 'ksh') that has earlier been assigned to "Kashmiri";

-          proposed addition of "Shona" language with the language tag 'SNA' (ISO tag 'sna') that has earlier been assigned to "Sena";

Some of these conflicts have already been reported earlier by John Hopkins (see his email: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpeg-OTspec/message/929), as well as some additional conflicts he found while reviewing the language system tags for his proposed list of new languages.

I am afraid that in the future, as we attempt to add more languages supported by the OT/OFF standard we may see this situation repeated when some of the tags already in use may conflict with the new tags defined according to ISO 639 standard. Therefore, I would suggest that we need to come up with a solution that would allow us reconcile the differences between OT language system tags and ISO 639 language tags. It is clear that for all newly defined languages new system tags should be based on ISO 639 tag; however, we need to find a systematic way that would allow us to resolve the existing and, potentially, future conflicts.

Thoughts?

Thank you,
Vladimir

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