LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM: iu-Cans

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Fri Feb 4 16:30:39 CET 2005


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Michael Everson


> 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?

No, I don't want to proliferate duplicate tags. The reality, though, is
that we do have *some* level of duplication already in the tags
implicitly sanctioned by RFC 3066.


> >how do we know when a country ID is useful or not?
> 
> When it helps make a genuine distinction?

And how do I determine that in every case?


> So we should register every blessed possible combination of tags?

No; but if people are using tags for whatever purpose, those should be
registered. I only submitted 16 registrations; every possible
combination would be slightly more.


> >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.

I didn't say otherwise. Within software systems, the relevant
infrastructure entity is a locale. But I am not asking for locale IDs.
(I'd be the last one to do that.) Every locale has a language associated
with it, and it is perfectly reasonable to ask a locale for its language
tag.


> >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.

I didn't say it was. My point was that, when a platform provides a
language tag in an API, there already is an issue that the client may
have a reason to use only a sub-portion of that tag. So in that regard
nothing would be new in a case like iu-Cans-CA.


> iu-Cans-CA and iu-Latn-CA (which you did not request)

Look again.


> >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.

I think the two are different.



Peter Constable


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list