language subtag registration request: Region EU

Mark Davis mark.davis at icu-project.org
Sat Jan 14 02:55:13 CET 2006


The same can be said for any region: the geographic area covered by the 
region may change over time. The tag en-EU is no less meaningful than 
en-US which, you will note, does not even have English as an official 
language, much less publish official glossaries, spelling and grammar 
rules for it! And it is a lot *more* meaningful than en-BV, or any 
number of similar perfectly legal and valid language tags.

Now, what is *really* screwy is ISO 3166, with this bizarre system of 4 
classes of assignment with these oddball "reserved" codes, plus a very 
special (if you look at the site from the link Markus passed out), very 
singular status for "EU". What would make all of our lives easier is if 
they just called a horse a horse, and said that EU is just a regularly 
assigned code. After all, there are many other entities that they have 
*no* problem giving codes to that not, by any stretch of the 
imagination, "countries".

Mark

Tex Texin wrote:

>For me, the question would be whether EU represents:
>
>1) the collection of countries at the time the tag was defined, or 
>2) the collection of countries at the time the tag is assigned to some
>content, or 
>3) is it the collection of countries at the time I process the tag?
>
>If I access content with an EU subtag, what countries are represented? 
>
>If the significance of EU is #2, then how do I know when it was assigned? 
>
>If #3, then the definition of the content is changing after it is published
>as the code is continuously redefined.
>
>If #1, then it is pretty much useless or at least outdated. We would need to
>define some new subtags every time the EU changes.
>Or we should only use EU with a year (or perhaps a full date) variant
>tag....
>
>It probably only is meaningful if the EU were actually to publish
>glossaries, spelling and grammar rules for some languages, so that you could
>refer to en-EU as english as defined and legislated by the European Union.
>
>tex
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