Request for variant subtag: western

[Peter Constable]

Please explain. Your mail to others does not AFAICT address the specific point I make here: if you revise a variant subtag by adding additional prefixes, we have no means to document what the denotation of some given prefix + variant combination is. 

 

E.g. suppose the entry for a variant subtag “western” were revised to include the prefix “en”, and some people start using it to denote some variety of English spoken in Cornwall while others start using it to denote some variety of English spoken in Western Australia, then there’s a mess.

 

 

Peter

 

________________________________

From: mark.edward.davis at gmail.com [mailto:mark.edward.davis at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mark Davis
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 5:02 PM
To: Peter Constable
Cc: IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: Request for variant subtag: western

 

That's based on a mistaken assumption (see my mail to others). Mark

On 8/29/06, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com > wrote:

> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at ccil.org ]


> As for hy-hyewest, I think it's awful.

While it may look aweful, an advantage of this is that we can document precisely what is meant by "hyewest" (or whatever form of subtag one might want) -- that is, it is the Armeanian variety spoken by the Armenian diaspora. 

But there is no way we can document how "western" ought to be interpreted in all of the combinations it is used (unless we want to allow multiple "western" variant entries, one for each prefix to be documented). 

And going back to a paper Gary Simons and I wrote back in 2000, documenting what tags are meant to denote is important. It won't help anybody if people start using "foo-western" but there are widely differing opinions as to what that refers to. 



Peter Constable
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