Subject: Re: [Ltru] Support of ISO 639 (was: Survey Tool pre-alpha)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:02:00 -0700

Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft dot com> wrote:

>> The use of collection codes in language tags is dubious, like saying 
>> "it's language group so-and-so, but information about individual 
>> language is not available".
>
> I'm of the same general opinion.

So am I, when we are talking about the "traditional" uses of language 
tags, viz. tagging Web pages and e-mails, or specifying desired matches 
in Web search engines.

But there may be other applications of language tags which we haven't 
yet thought of, in which the sender could say, "This content is in some 
Austro-Asiatic language, but I don't know which one" and the receiver 
may be able to make some use of that knowledge.  I think it would be a 
mistake for us to assume that no such application exists or will exist. 
Indeed, we should hope that BCP 47 is so wonderful and so well designed 
that people find new uses for it.

Collection codes have not caused significant trouble in the past.  There 
has been no great epidemic of people tagging content as "Germanic 
(other)" when they should have chosen a subtag for a specific Germanic 
language instead, and I don't imagine the change in scope from exclusive 
to inclusive will bring on such an epidemic.  As with private-use 
subtags, I'd be opposed to making any change that would further 
discourage these.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ 

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From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:17:07 -0800

From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell

> But there may be other applications of language tags...

Which is why I included the "general" qualifier in my comment. I didn't mean to re-open this issue: we debated this a long time ago, and the consensus taken was to continue to include collective language categories in the registry. There's no reason to re-visit that.

Peter