Subject: [Ltru] Re: extlang

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:55:42 -0700

GerardM <gerard dot meijssen at gmail dot com> wrote:

> When you have a choice between ar-EG and arz and think you can say 
> they are the same, how would you then code spoken Egyptian as used by 
> the immigrant community in the USA ?? I would say that ar-arz-US and 
> arz-US are appropriate. The notion that ar-EG is necessarily the same 
> as arz is imho wrong.

"-US" is appropriate only to the extent that the immigrant community 
speaks a sufficiently different flavor of (Egyptian) Arabic to justify 
different tagging.  It is not justified if the language is the same as 
spoken in Egypt, but the people happen to reside in the United States.

> Coding it like ar-EG-US is probably not acceptable.

Of course not.

--
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: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:07:10 -0700

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> I just discussed the matter with Barbara Coleman (IANA), at the IETF 
> meeting. She said that IANA has no problem with UTF-8, providing that 
> it is clearly specified in the RFC, with the list of allowed 
> characters, if IANA is to check them (which is not the case for the 
> Description fields, I believe, unlike subtags where IANA checks they 
> are unique).

Subtags are constrained to be Basic Latin (ASCII) letters and digits, as 
stated in RFC 4646, and are unaffected by a change from hex NCRs to 
UTF-8.

Descriptions and comments could theoretically include almost any ISO 
10646 character, so providing a list would make little sense.

Did Barbara say anything about converting the data from hex NCRs *to* 
UTF-8?  That was the crux as far as I was concerned.  We want the 
Registry to be in UTF-8, but it will be delivered via an I-D that must 
use hex NCRs.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:17:25 -0700

Don Osborn <dzo at bisharat dot net> wrote:

> "Macrolanguage" is an interesting concept, but whatever its original 
> intent (and whatever linguists in general think of it), it seems bound 
> to accrue other meanings and applications. This is not necessarily bad 
> though it might complicate life for coding.

I think we would do well to remember that macrolanguages are a concept 
defined by ISO 639/RA, and we need to respect the concept as they have 
defined it regardless of how we choose to reflect it in language tags. 
As a WG we should not get involved in extending the concept, although 
some might wish to do so as individuals (and that is between them and 
ISO 639/RA).

There is such a diversity of interpretations of the macrolanguage 
concept on this list alone that I am concerned this WG will be 
perceived, both within and without, as responsible for (a) defining the 
concept, (b) extending the definition, or (c) assigning macrolanguages. 
None of this is our job.

---

From: Gerard Meijssen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:28:03 +0100

Hoi,
The Dutch expat communities in the US speak Dutch but it is markedly 
different from the modern Dutch spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium. 
Not only is the Dutch "old fashioned" it has also included some 
Americanisms where you might find Anglicisms or a Dutch word in the 
Netherlands. My ar-EG and arz-eg example follows this example; it is not 
safe to equate ar-EG as exclusively the same as arz or arz-EG and ar-arz-EG.
Thanks,
    Gerard

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:40:42 -0700

Mark and Addison both bring up excellent points about the extlang 
mechanism and I need to spend some time thinking about it.

---

From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:41:47 -0700

From: Doug Ewell [mailto:[email-masked]]

> defined by ISO 639/RA,

Slight correction: defined by ISO 639-3 (and it will also be defined in ISO 639-4).

> and we need to respect the concept as they have
> As a WG we should not get involved in extending the concept...

> concept, (b) extending the definition, or (c) assigning macrolanguages.

Indeed. ISO 639-3 provides the definition: an entry "with a scope representing multiple, closely-related individual languages that are deemed in some usage context to be a single language."

John's description was basically the right one.

We should not confuse the definition in ISO 639-3 with the JAC process of making decisions regarding certain pre-existing entries in ISO 639-2, like whether "Lahnda" should be treated as a macrolanguage category.

Peter

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:18:52 -0400

Gerard Meijssen scripsit:

> Netherlands. 

Indeed.  Here are two samples (in different dialects of nl-US) recorded
about a hundred years ago:

	[on immigrant Dutch, from the viewpoint of a nl-US speaker in
	New Jersey]  Onze tal äz lex däuts en hoelliz äs Holläns;
	kwait dääfrent.

	[from an anonymous pamphlet published in Grand Rapids, Michigan]
	't Had tamelijk ferm gesneeuwd de laatste twee dagen,
	zoodat de farmers toch nog een sleeride konden krijgen in het
	bijna vervlogen jaar. Vooral de young folks hunkerden naar een
	cutter-ride. Bijna allerwege in den omtrek van de Star Corners
	waren de cutters dan ook voor den dag gehaald en nagezien, want
	alles moest natuurlijk in running-order zijn. De dust moest er
	afgeveegd, hier en daar een bur wat aangetight, de kussens een
	weinig opgefixt, en de bells vooral nauwkeurig onderzocht.

It may be said that essentially every language spoken by any substantial
community of immigrants has developed a -US form; many of these are
moribund or extinct, or have evolved into separate languages like
Pennsylvania German.

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]  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

---

From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:29:58 -0700

Hi,

On Mar 20, 2007, at 7:07 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
>> I just discussed the matter with Barbara Coleman (IANA),

Roseman, not Coleman.

>> at the IETF meeting. She said that IANA has no problem with UTF-8,  
>> providing that it is clearly specified in the RFC, with the list  
>> of allowed characters, if IANA is to check them (which is not the  
>> case for the Description fields, I believe, unlike subtags where  
>> IANA checks they are unique).
>
> Subtags are constrained to be Basic Latin (ASCII) letters and  
> digits, as stated in RFC 4646, and are unaffected by a change from  
> hex NCRs to UTF-8.
>
> Descriptions and comments could theoretically include almost any  
> ISO 10646 character, so providing a list would make little sense.
>
> Did Barbara say anything about converting the data from hex NCRs  
> *to* UTF-8?

I doubt it as I suspect she (like me) has no idea what "NCRs" are.

> That was the crux as far as I was concerned.  We want the Registry  
> to be in UTF-8, but it will be delivered via an I-D that must use  
> hex NCRs.

So you want IANA to do a post processing step to translate hex NCRs  
(whatever they are) into UTF-8?  That's fine, as long as the IANA  
considerations section is clear about what we need to do for the  
translation.

Rgds,
-drc
General Manager, IANA

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:47:38 +0100

David Conrad wrote:

> no idea what "NCRs" are.

Numerical Character Reference, in Web documents in the form
&#x103456; for u+103456.  It's what you have in the language
subtag registry today.  

Some "misguided" folks (= roughly anybody but me here) want
to switch the registry to UTF-8.  You'd then get one last
Internet-Draft in the old style (because I-Ds are US ASCII)
with hex. NCRs, and "somehow" you'd have to translate this
to UTF-8 (once).
 
> So you want IANA to do a post processing step to translate
> hex NCRs (whatever they are) into UTF-8?  That's fine, as
> long as the IANA considerations section is clear about what
> we need to do for the translation.

Deriving UTF-32 from the NCR-input would be very simple, and
from there to UTF-8 you'd pick whatever you have.  And most
likely deriving UTF-16 will do if all NCRs stay below &#xFFFF;

Frank

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:53:20 -0700

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> It may be said that essentially every language spoken by any 
> substantial community of immigrants has developed a -US form; many of 
> these are moribund or extinct, or have evolved into separate languages 
> like Pennsylvania German.

There are several different flavors of "es-US": Mexican-influenced, 
Puerto Rican-influenced, and Cuban-influenced would probably be the 
largest.  And I don't know how one would go about tagging "Mexican" 
es-US differently from "Cuban" es-US.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:56:22 -0700

> es-US differently from "Cuban" es-US.

Ah ... back to the same problem raised with my need for a tag for 
"Scottish English." :)

Karen Broome

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:07:33 -0400

> es-US differently from "Cuban" es-US.

Variant subtags, of course.  Regional subtags are really just variant
subtags that we use if and only if they are convenient, just because
they happen to be predefined for us.

-- 
John Cowan     http://ccil.org/~cowan    [email-masked]
Monday we watch-a Firefly's house, but he no come out.  He wasn't home.
Tuesday we go to the ball game, but he fool us.  He no show up.  Wednesday he
go to the ball game, and we fool him.  We no show up.  Thursday was a
double-header.  Nobody show up.  Friday it rained all day.  There was no ball
game, so we stayed home and we listened to it on-a the radio.  --Chicolini

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:48:05 -0700

David Conrad <david dot conrad at icann dot org> wrote:

>> UTF-8?

Numeric Character References are sequences of hexadecimal (or decimal) 
numbers that stand for a real character, starting with the sequence &#x 
(or &# for decimal) and ending with a semicolon.

&#xE1; is a sequence that stands for Unicode character U+00E1, a 
lowercase "a" with acute accent (á).  We use these currently in the 
Language Subtag Registry, to keep the file ASCII-only, but they're ugly 
and hard to understand.

> considerations section is clear about what we need to do for the 

I will be sure to put the instructions in the I-D.  Thanks for gettting 
back with us.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:54:42 -0700

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> And I don't know how one would go about tagging "Mexican" es-US 
>> differently from "Cuban" es-US.
>
> Variant subtags, of course.

Well, not unless someone proposed the variants and they were registered. 
(Preferably not me, considering my 0% track record on subtag proposals.) 
And I'm not sure whether these would be best considered as the Mexican 
(Cuban) variant of es-US, or the United States variant of es-MX (es-CU).

Actually I do know how to tag them, of course: private-use.

> Regional subtags are really just variant subtags that we use if and 
> only if they are convenient, just because they happen to be predefined 
> for us.

Correct.