Preliminary proposal for 225 language-country pairs

[John Cowan]

Mark Davis scripsit:

> It seems arbitrary to generate all the possible variations,

I'm trying to provide a set of *plausible* variations, at least
some of which are going to represent actual variation.  If there
are a few too many, no matter.

> on the off
> chance that some are usefully distinguishable.

There is no question of "off chance": many are clearly distinguishable.
See below.

> In terms of speech, for
> example, mine is closer to a en-CA then it is to an en-NYC.

But do you write "tyre centre", "tire center", or "tire centre"?

> This is also not divorced from the notion of locale; the two are
> closely intertwined in practice.

In the sense that the nonlinguistic components of a locale are often
closely correlated with country, yes.  But whereas nv_US is a plausible
locale, nv-us is a redundant though not incorrect tag (just nv does
the job).

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_