Reshat Sabiq's requests for two Tatar orthographic variants

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

> From: "CE Whitehead" <cewcathar at hotmail.com>
> To: <dewell at adelphia.net>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at alvestrand.no>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 11:36 AM
> Subject: Re: Reshat Sabiq's requests for two Tatar orthographic variants
>
> 
> Thanks but could somone please clarify what is meant by the terms 
> orthography and script here;
> I am taking orthography in this definition to mean a variant of a script but 
> I am really not sure.

Cyrillic, latin and greek are examples of scripts.
Examples of orthographies for English (in the latin script) would
be the use of US, Canadian, and OED spellings.  An orthography is
not a variant of a script, but rather a particular way of using
a script to represent material in a given language.  Orthographies
are not to be confused with regional variants.  For example,
depending on the orthography in use, in German one could write
"Thal" or "Tal", depending on which spelling reforms were in effect
at the time.

The thing that's a bit bothersome is that if the orthography is given,
one can infer the script from the registration data.  However, for
languages that are written in multiple scripts, the script subtag is still
needed, even though if the orthography is also indicated, in some semses
the script subtag is redundant.  This is because omitting the script
subtag would cause problems for matching.

Randy