Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c Resubmitted!

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Tue Dec 19 22:40:34 CET 2006


CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> What happens to en and oed en?  Do these tags hinder interoperability?

You are still not understanding the nature of the objection.  It is not 
at all comparable to OED.  It has to do with creating two tags that 
represent either two different languages (so the concern about 
"different semantic meanings" comes into play) or the same language 
(differentiated only by whether the tagger chose to associate the 
content with Modern French or Middle French).

"OED English" is simply an indication of the orthography -- the 
spelling, if you will.   Here is an example; note how both words are 
spelled.

en-US:
    labor organization

en-GB:
    labour organisation

en-GB-oed:
    labour organization

The last sample could arguably be tagged as "en-GB" instead of 
"en-GB-oed", or alternatively, all three lines could be tagged as just 
"en".  The additional information in each tag narrows the scope.

If you have both tags "fr-whatever" and "frm-whatever" and they do not 
identify, respectively, a specific type of Modern French and a specific 
type of Middle French, or if you choose one tag or the other to 
compensate for deficiencies in building some sort of search query, then 
the additional information "whatever" does NOT narrow the scope of "fr" 
or "frm", it broadens it.  That is my objection.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
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