Registered sgn-* tags

[Michael Everson]

At 10:15 -0700 2004-07-12, Doug Ewell wrote:

>Would these not have been valid under the generative grammar of RFC
>3066?  We have sgn-BR for Brazilian Sign Language, sgn-CO for Colombian
>Sign Language, and so forth.

They might well have been.

>How does this differ from "Sign Languages as used in Brazil," "Sign 
>Languages as used in Colombia," etc. which would be the 
>interpretation according to the generative grammar?

Don't ask me.

>I wasn't on this list when they were registered, so I missed the 
>discussion.  Can someone summarize it for me?  I'm just trying to 
>understand why it was felt necessary to register them instead of 
>letting them be generated.

Because the user community wanted to be able to reference properly 
registered entities, which I consider to be a useful thing, 
regardless of how clever 3066bis is.

>Of course, the "extended" language tags sgn-BE-fr, sgn-BE-nl, and
>sgn-CH-de are a different matter.  They don't follow the grammar of
>either RFC 3066 or draft-04, so there was no choice; they had to be
>registered under the former and grandfathered into the latter.

There is a requirement to be able to generate more of this kind of 
tag, for signed speech. I hope that "grandfathered" doesn't mean that 
such will be forbidden in future, because that will not do.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com