Subject: [Ltru] Re: extlang

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:32:04 -0700

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> Which yields 54 macrolanguages in 4645bis, zap (Zapotec) being the one 
> with the most extlangs, 58 (if we do not count the sign languages).

I assume that if the extlang mechanism were abolished, then the special-case 
handling of "sgn" would not occur either, and American Sign Language would 
be indicated as simply "ase" (not "sgn-ase"), and "sgn-US" would be 
deprecated in favor of "ase".

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:38:52 -0700

Addison Phillips <addison at yahoo dash inc dot com> wrote:

> I take it you're suggesting (or interpreted the proposal) to mean that the 
> macrolanguage would contain a pointer or pointers to its sublanguages. 
> Hence something like:
>
> %%
> Type: language
> Subtag: zh
> Description: Chinese
> ...
> Encloses: yue,cmn,.....
> %%

I don't like this, for at least two reasons:

1.  If the goal if to facilitate matching, then the direction of fallback 
ought to be from "yue" (or "cmn", etc.) back to "zh".  It doesn't make sense 
to put the fallback information in "zh" in that case.

2.  As Addison noted, we already have a precedent for using multiple fields 
to indicate multiple Prefix values.  I see no point in putting multiple 
values in a single "Encloses" field and introducing a new comma-separation 
convention for just this field.