Subject: [Ltru] Re: Extlangs or not?

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:05:34 -0700

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

> I do support Frank in wanting the fewest extlangs possible. The rules 
> as I've currently written them will most likely create quite extensive 
> lists of them.

I count 478 extlangs (including 124 sign languages) along with 7,195 
primary languages.  Put another way, there will tentatively be 15 times 
as many primary language subtags as extlangs.

The 478 extlangs have 53 different Prefix values, an average of 9 
possible extlangs per macrolanguage.  Obviously this is skewed by the 
sign languages.

> It might be nice if we could cherry-pick somehow (that is, have mostly 
> language subtags with very few extlangs), but any rules we would 
> invent for that would be entirely arbitrary.

Cherry-picking = bad.  Arbitrary = bad.  Not only is this bad in and of 
itself, it could also cause us problems during IETF Last Call and on 
appeals.

> The only non-arbitrary rule I can think of is: we only introduce 
> "enclosing" languages for those that are already registered as such. 
> That is:
>
> "zh"
> "sgn"
>
> Everything else is a language.

This is much too arbitrary.  Don't do it.

> Thoughts?

Yes, I have a thought.  We need to stop inventing things and then 
immediately declaring them Bad and Deprecated and To Be Avoided. 
Unicode has established a pattern of that for years, with CGJ and Plane 
14 tag characters and annotation characters and the Private Use Area, 
and it doesn't necessarily present the best image of stability and 
thoughtful design.

Here in LTRU we have invented the concept of extended language subtags, 
allowed up to three of them at a time in the syntax, and now we are 
trying to find ways to minimize or eliminate them.  We went out of our 
way to specify that the Description field was non-normative (among many 
other caveats in Section 3.1) and now we can't even change them for fear 
of breaking some unknown process that might rely on their stability.  We 
need to start embracing our own inventions, or else taking a more 
careful look before inventing.

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

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 06:21:37 -0700

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

> I don't know why anybody has a problem with extlangs. I don't expect a 
> lot of extlangs will occur in the wild: they can only exist in cases 
> like zh and ar where the majority of content by far will use the 
> macrolanguage ID and nothing more because the macrolanguage ID is 
> already widely used. Keep in mind the whole point of the notion of 
> macrolanguages: the collective gets referred to in existing 
> applications as though its one language while gauged by other measures 
> its multiple languages. We ought to want a matching relationship to 
> exist in these cases; extlangs give us that with no additional 
> machinery.

+1