[Suppress-Script] Initial list of 300 languages

[Peter Constable]

> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Caoimhin O Donnaile

> I didn't come across any examples of "ga-IE"...

> "ga-IE" would carry no additional meaning as a language tag anyway...

> As John says, though, we can't be sure it has never been used
> - maybe inserted automatically by some software.
> 
> Now that I know that Latg is only about fonts, not characters, I think
> it is likely to be of so little interest to most people that I think the
> Suppress-Script for "ga" should stay as Latn.

I think we need to discuss the "we can't be sure" clause. You've looked at several places and not found any usage of "ga-IE", and indicated there wouldn't really be any need for it. How many places do we have to look before we're confident that we don't need to specify a Suppress-Script value? No matter how many placed we have already looked, we can never know there weren't more placed we could have looked. Clearly, we can't have an operational criterion that requires to look in all places.

I think we're going to end up going around in circles on this unless we agree on an operational principle that we don't need to add suppress-script values for back-compat reasons unless it's pretty obvious to us that they're needed -- to deal with cases like de-DE, not cases like sga-IE. Otherwise, we're going to remain stuck on how to deal with all kinds of unclear cases where I think we'd be wasting our time. If there isn't enough established usage for us to know if, say, ga-IE has been widely used, then there isn't a lot of past usage that we need to worry about breaking. If that's the case, then all we need to decide is for *future* usage whether we think we want to treat one script as an implicit default. For future usage, we may decide to suppress Latn for ga, but that has nothing to do with not being sure about past usage.


‎> And maybe even sga and
‎> mga should be given a Suppress-Script of Latn too??‎

Not based on past usage. Based on future requirements, perhaps.



Peter Constable