Registration of el-Latn language tag
Doug Ewell
dewell at adelphia.net
Thu Sep 29 17:09:41 CEST 2005
Marion Gunn <mgunn at egt dot ie> wrote:
>> Personally, I disagree with your en-GB example. From a linguistic
>> standpoint, maybe it is english from the UK....
>
> No maybe about it, Tex - you are right to cast doubt on what would be
> a linguistic and geographical impossibility, because 'GB' only means
> 'Great Britain', which is a different geo/ling entity from "UK" which
> means "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (a
> matter already dealt with years ago on this and/or related lists).
Then it's surprising you don't remember the outcome of that discussion,
years ago. GB stands for "United Kingdom," the *whole* United Kingdom,
including the top part of the second-largest island in the group.
>From the current ISO 3166 Web site:
> GB UNITED KINGDOM
>From the 2004-06-17 committee draft to update ISO 3166-1:
> English short name: UNITED KINGDOM
> English short name lower case: United Kingdom (the)
> English full name: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
> Ireland
> Alpha-2 code: GB
> Alpha-3 code: GBR
> Numeric code: 826
> Remarks: Includes the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man
> Independent: *
> Official language alpha-2: en
> Official language alpha-3: eng
> Local short name: United Kingdom (the)
And from draft-initial-05:
> Type: region
> Subtag: GB
> Description: United Kingdom
> Added: 2005-08-16
Marion added:
> Meaning, instead of just fixing wrong encodings, just use them to try
> to change reality? Hardly a new idea.:-)
ISO 3166-1 codes are not necessarily abbreviations for "best" country
names. They "represent" country names; they don't necessarily "stand
for" anything in a mnemonic sense. GB is no more a "wrong encoding" for
the United Kingdom than EH is for Western Sahara, or YT for Mayotte. If
ISO 3166/MA were trying to "change reality," they would do so in the
name and not the code.
Arguments like this one, that ISO 3166-1 code elements must be as
mnemonic as possible, are probably what led the MA to the infamous
decision to recycle CS for Serbia and Montenegro instead of choosing a
"fresh" code element like SP, which already had some popular acceptance
but which could be viewed by zealots as excluding Montenegro (SR =
Srpski).
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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