Subject: RE: [Ltru] Re: New ISO 639 language identifier approved: SwissGerman; Alemanic

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 12:18:39 -0800

There was discussion on the list that forced my registration of gsw. I 
previously thought de-CH and de-AT applied to these Swiss and Austrian 
dialects as well, and I'm sure this is not an uncommon belief.  It was 
made clear that these tags applied to German and Austrian variants of 
standard German, often combined with the tagging for the spelling reforms, 
and did not apply to the primarily spoken dialects I was trying to 
identify. 

I guess this case shows both the advantages and potential pitfalls of RFC 
3066bis and how tagging building blocks defined by RFC 3066bis could be 
combined in an inaccurate ways by those who are unfamiliar with such 
subtleties . Perhaps the multiple description feature in the registry will 
help resolve some of these ambiguities -- it's not particularly 
unreasonable to assume that de-CH defines "Swiss German."  If this tag is 
added to the registry, I would also include the description "Schwyzerdütsch." This is also the name used for this language in 639-3.

Regards,

Karen Broome
Metadata Systems Designer
Sony Pictures Entertainment
310.244.4384

Misha Wolf <[email-masked]>
Sent by: [email-masked]
11/07/2005 11:33 AM

        To:     Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>, LTRU Working Group 
<[email-masked]>
        cc: 
        Subject:        RE: [Ltru] Re: New ISO 639 language identifier approved: 
SwissGerman;Alemanic

I must have been asleep at the time :-)

This will require some fancy user education!

Misha

-----Original Message-----
From: Addison Phillips [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 07 November 2005 19:26
To: Misha Wolf; LTRU Working Group
Subject: RE: [Ltru] Re: New ISO 639 language identifier approved:
SwissGerman;Alemanic

According to the ietf-languages list discussion, 'gsw' and "de-CH" are
not the same language, despite their English names. As such, "gsw-*" and
"de-*-CH-*" don't match.

Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect, Quest Software
Chair, W3C Internationalization Core Working Group

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture. 

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---

From: Erik van der Poel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:15:29 -0800

I'm sorry that I brought up an old issue! I just joined ietf-languages. 
I agree with Karen that it would be a good idea to use the multiple 
description feature to point out the subtleties. Perhaps gsw should be 
mentioned in the entries for de, CH, de-CH-1901 and de-CH-1996. Or maybe 
a pointer (URI) to a document that briefly explains this stuff. E.g.

%%
Type: language
Subtag: de
Description: German
Description: see also 
http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tag-docs/swiss-german
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Latn
%%

(and the same for CH, de-CH-1901, de-CH-1996 and gsw)

Erik

[email-masked] wrote:
> standard German, often combined with the tagging for the spelling 
> reforms, and did not apply to the primarily spoken dialects I was trying 
> to identify.
> 
> I guess this case shows both the advantages and potential pitfalls of 
> RFC 3066bis and how tagging building blocks defined by RFC 3066bis could 
> be combined in an inaccurate ways by those who are unfamiliar with such 
> subtleties . Perhaps the multiple description feature in the registry 
> will help resolve some of these ambiguities -- it's not particularly 
> unreasonable to assume that de-CH defines "Swiss German."  If this tag 
> is added to the registry, I would also include the description 
> "Schwyzerdütsch." This is also the name used for this language in 639-3.