Subject: [Ltru] Re: 3066ter encompassed languages

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:24:48 -0700

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> For example, 639-1 (and a fortiori 4646) has "ar", meaning simply 
>> "Arabic", a term encompassing some 30 distinct languages.  Rather 
>> than requiring people in search of any sort of Arabic to search for 
>> 30 distinct tags, or requiring matchers to keep a table mapping "ar" 
>> to all those tags, we instead require taggers specifying (say) 
>> Algerian Arabic to use "ar-aao" instead of just "aao".  That way, 
>> searches for "ar" will automatically match.
>
> So far okay.  And are we sure that this info has to be made explicit 
> in billions of tags instead of once in the registry ?

Only in those tags where "Algerian Saharan Spoken Arabic" needs to be 
explicitly noted, where just plain "Arabic" would be insufficient. 
Probably not that many billions.

> Last chance to pull a "Suppress-Macrolanguage" SHOULD in 4646bis (as 
> in SHOULD aao, or SHOULD NOT ar-aao).

Yeah.  That would be a *great* can of worms for us to open.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
RFC 4645  •  UTN #14

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:30:19 -0700

Frank Ellermann <nobody at xyzzy dot claranet dot de> wrote:

>> That's a problem for the [email-masked] list.
>
> The "description" shouldn't be their territory, it should be fixed in 
> the sources.  For 4646bis I'd like a statement that we expect all 
> primary and extlang tags to use a unique namespace (apparent "dupes" 
> limited to grandfathered tags).

We intentionally made it possible, in Section 3.4, to change the 
description "Upper Volta" to "Burkina Faso" to match changes in usage. 
Probably that one would be implemented by adding the new name and 
keeping the old, though.

> But we cannot guarantee that there's only one non-deprecated subtag 
> for a given (primary or extlang) description.  With an example if it 
> exists, maybe "Malay".

That's why I recommend using the 639-3 names "Malay (generic)" and 
"Malay (specific)" and getting rid of just plain "Malay".

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:20:52 -0700

Disclaimer: I haven't read Addison's new draft yet.

Mark Davis <mark dot davis at icu dash project dot org> wrote:

> 2. Since we know that there will be only one extlang, do we want to 
> change the following?
>
>>There MAY be up to three extended language subtags.
>
> The disadvantage is that some tags will be well-formed (although 
> invalid) on past parsers but not this one.

-1.  Extlangs are provided only by the Registry anyway, so I see no need 
for this breaking change.

> 6. We'll have to fix the following:
>
>        At the time this document was written, there were only four
>        such codes: 830 (Channel Islands), 831 (Guernsey), 832
>        (Jersey), and 833 (Isle of Man).  This way, UN M.49 codes
>        remain available as the value of last resort in cases where ISO
>        3166 reassigns a deprecated value in the registry.

IMHO, examples like this don't belong in 4646bis at all, only in 
4645bis.  Serbia and Montenegro (two separate countries now) may provide 
us with a new use case.

RFC 4645  *  UTN #14