Re: ISO 639-3

[John Cowan]

Bruno Haible scripsit:

> But still, isn't it an indication that they didn't understand the
> things they were assigning identifiers for?

To some degree.  Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were treated as
a separate species until just recently, when they were reclassified
as a variety of gray wolves (Canis lupus).  That doesn't mean that
Linnaeus and his successors for two centuries didn't know what a dog is.
In particular, if a text (broadly construed) was properly tagged 'xyz'
before, then it is properly tagged 'xyz' now as well.

-- 
John Cowan  address@hidden  http://ccil.org/~cowan
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should
be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population.
For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the
regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six
shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such
putrid black treason.  --Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee