Sign languages

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Sun Feb 26 03:43:15 CET 2006


John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> I think that's splitting hairs.  sgn-US unquestionably means American
> Sign Language, by RFC 3066 registration; it would be entirely proper
> for people to use sgn-CR for Costa Rican SL.

If "sgn-US" unquestionably meant ASL, we wouldn't be having most of this 
discussion.

"sgn-US" generatively means "sign languages as used in the United 
States."  It could have been used in RFC 3066 with that meaning with no 
need for registration.  The purpose of registering it was to narrow the 
meaning to "American Sign Language."  This is how Michael explained it 
to me when I asked the same question.

>> In cases like Algerian SL, American SL, and so forth, where the sgn +
>> region syntax would be syntactically legal, why don't we add *both*
>> to the registry and make one Preferred over the other?
>
> Because multiple codes for the same thing is a big annoyance and
> impedes matching.  Essentially the same reason why we are going to use
> zh-yue instead of just yue.

The difference is, I've never heard anyone state before that we have to 
retain "yue" because people may have already used it in language tags. 
You said this was possibly the case for "sgn-CR".

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ 




More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list