zh-****-** tags

Frank Ellermann nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de
Sat Mar 19 00:16:15 CET 2005


Peter Constable wrote:

> The fact that these regions happen to belong to CN does not
> mean that HK and MO are not perfectly acceptable region IDs.

Sure, use pt-MO or en-HK where needed.  But don't abuse these
codes in artificial tags for languages which are not directly
related to MO or HK.  The *-MO proposals sound like de-LI-1996
vs. de-LI-1901.  Or like en-US-NewOrleans vs. en-US-NewYork.

> we have tags such as zh-guoyu and zy-yue.

Yes, and if I understood the ethnologue info correctly the
latter is not good enough to cover a (hypothetical) zh-SG-yue.
If that's the case it doesn't automatically justify zh-MO-yue
(under the 3066 rules).

> it is not unreasonable to use zh-CN, zh-HK, etc. to
> indicate these distinctions in regional sub-varieties

de-LI, de-BE, and some others are also not unreasonable, quite
the contrary.  Dito zh-US and others.  But I don't see why
that's a reason to register all theoretical permutations under
3066 rules.

> Apparently you have either just joined the list

Yes, because the new 3066bis idea of region codes is dubious,
and adding these zh-hanZ-XY tags as grandfathered to a future
3066bis registry makes it worse.  Redundant would be only ugly
and no real problem, but more grandfathered tags are not what
a future 3066bis and its future implementations need.

> script distinctions are almost always going to matter more
> than regional dialect or spelling variations

Not if it's a language with a "default" script like Latn.  It's
not yet clear how 3066bis will solve this problem if at all.

The last state was that en-Latn-US-boont won't match en-boont.
Your idea to sort subtags by importance is fine, that could
result in en-boont-Latn-US, de-1996-LI, zh-yue-SG, etc.  Bye.




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