Subject: [Ltru] Korean suppress script

From: Martin Hosken <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:15:19 +0700

Dear Doug,

Somewhere buried in the threads you mentioned that ko has not been given
a suppress script because it is possible that some text may be encoded
as ko-Hang and some as something else which I presume to be a
combination of Hang+Hant (but there seems to be no script code for that
combination).

This raises the question as to when a language should have a suppress
script and when not. Given that *any* language may be written using
-fonipa, it can't be that a language only receives a suppress script if
it cannot be rendered in another script. In effect the suppress script
says: for this language if no script is specified then the script is the
suppress script AND the suppressed script should not appear in language
tags for this language. The upshot of which is that any script can be
earmarked as being the suppressed script for a language, it's just wise
to use the most common. In fact it's probably ideal that all languages
have a suppressed script unless there is strong reason not to have one
so that a raw lang only tag can be given meaning.

In the case of ko, I would suggest that it should have a suppressed
script of Hang and old text including Hant or using some other script
should be explicitly marked.

Yours,
Martin

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:43:32 +0200

Martin Hosken wrote:

> script and when not.

Yes, but...

> In effect the suppress script says: for this language if no script is
> specified then the script is the suppress script AND the suppressed
> script should not appear in language tags for this language.

...no.  There are other reasons to use no script subtag, e.g. if it's
non-written content, OR it's a "legacy" (pre-4646) tag, OR it's for an
application not interested in scripts (arguably the application could
then just ignore script subtagts, unless it's an old application and/or
tag size matters, etc.)

> The upshot of which is that any script can be earmarked as being
> the suppressed script for a language, it's just wise to use the most
> common.

In theory.  In practice IMO a bad idea, using a script subtag or not can
have reasons unrelated to the existence of a registered Suppress-Script.

And picking the "most common" script can be a rather tricky political
question, like defining what a "country" is -- or is not, the endless
Wikipedia micronation debates are <spock> fascinating </spock>.

> In fact it's probably ideal that all languages have a suppressed
> script

An ideal would be to have no such kludge at all.  But in that case
4646 tags should be strictly incompatible with all pre-4646 tags, for
a clear restart from scratch.  The WG was chartered excluding this
radical approach, and it didn't move to get rid of this restriction.

So now we've got that lukewarm compromise Suppress-Scripts, and for
the "old" (not 4645bis) languages missing Suppress-Scripts have to be
added when identified.  For "new" 4645bis languages it's slightly less
important, new tags can't claim that they were added under pre-4646
rules.  Of course the same pre-4646 applications existing last year
will continue to exist for decades, and the Suppress-Scripts might be
also relevant for "new" languages (wrt naive right-to-left matching.)

Frank