LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM: iu-Cans

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Fri Feb 4 10:55:35 CET 2005


At 22:34 -0800 2005-02-03, Peter Constable wrote:

>I cannot predict when a user will determine that iu-Cans-CA needs to 
>be distinguished from (say) iu-Cans-US.

There aren't any communities of Inuktitut speakers in the US using 
Syllabics in any way that would make it differ from such communities 
in Canada.

So... you want to proliferate a set of duplicate tags, all with the 
same referent?

Apparently I have no choice but to approve all of these, because they 
will be implicit in this RFC's successors, and obviously they refer 
to real things. But I dislike the duplicate encodings.

>how do we know when a country ID is useful or not?

When it helps make a genuine distinction?

>Add to that the potential to get users offended by geo-political 
>issues: "you consider that community to exist independent of any 
>nation, yet you tie us to country X". For many reasons, we really 
>cannot take on making judgments about
>precisely what the correct tags for users' needs will be.

So we should register every blessed possible combination of tags?

>Keep in mind that users' needs aren't consistently the same: if someone
>asks for an RFC3066 tag that would apply to (e.g.) the "French (France)"
>locale,

RFC3066 tags specify languages.

>we have no way of knowing whether, in the particular context
>they want to use the tag, the best tag would be "fr" or "fr-FR".
>Sometimes it will be one, but other times it will be the other.

That is not in any way analogous to Inuktitut. All iu is spoken in 
Canada. There is a writing system difference: iu-Latn and iu-Cans 
make sense. iu-Cyrl and iu-Hebr do not. iu-Cans-CA and iu-Latn-CA 
(which you did not request) are redundant.

There are orthographic differences between Nunavut Inuktitut and 
Nunavik Inuttitut [sic] which use Cans that *would* be relevant for 
tagging.

>Also, I think the reluctance to register a tag like iu-Cans-CA is
>mistaken on other grounds: we are not obligated to determine that every
>valid tag denotes something distinct from every other valid tag.

We are in ISO 639, and this RFC provides extensions to that.

>That is already impossible, since RFC 3066 defines many things as valid that
>would not correspond to actual linguistic distinctions.

Such as?

>I suspect that there's no distinction between fr-CI and fr-GH, but 
>both are valid tags, and probably in use somewhere.

That's still no reason to encode iu-Cans-CA as distinct from... well, nothing.

>In a case like "iu-Cans-CA", it is clear what the intended meaning is
>(even if it wasn't stated explicitly in the registration form), it there
>are sufficiently-clear ways in which it can be used.

It is clear that it is identical to iu-Cans, anyway.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com


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