Suppress-Script candidates (was: Re: frr, fy, ngo, tt)

[John Cowan]

Don Osborn scripsit:

> Has there been any discussion of forms having an additional logical
> step like: "Is this language native to more than one country?" (before
> the choice of countries line) or "Is this language written in more
> than one alphabet" (before the the choice of scripts line)?

IETF language tagging has always allowed you to specify any country
with any language, whether it makes sense for that language or not.
Indeed, this rule goes back to ISO 639 itself, which provided it as a
common use case for language code elements.

This is partly because the concepts of language tag and locale overlap:
though there is no distinctly U.S. dialect of Japanese (as far as I know),
the idea of someone in the U.S., using U.S. measurements and currency,
but writing in Japanese is perfectly plausible.

Consequently, there is no backward-compatibility problem:  ja and ja-JP
are de facto the same thing without needing to say so explicitly.  The
need for Suppress-Script arises because script subtags were added in
a way that is not entirely backward compatible.

> Has any thought been given to, at a relatively modest expense hopefully,
> having a team of say linguist grad students create "stub" locales for
> *all* languages in ISO-639 (attention to the 1, 2, 3's of course),
> including appropriate suppress script/country or default indications as
> necessary and also an appropriate range of countries for a language code
> when it is spoken in more than one. 

If you can set such a thing up, and arrange for someone to stand the
expense, we will all be deeply in your debt.  As things stand, everything
has to be done by distributed review using a review team of casually
interested amateurs.

-- 
John Cowan    http://ccil.org/~cowan    cowan at ccil.org
[T]here is a Darwinian explanation for the refusal to accept Darwin.
Given the very pessimistic conclusions about moral purpose to which his
theory drives us, and given the importance of a sense of moral purpose
in helping us cope with life, a refusal to believe Darwin's theory may
have important survival value. --Ian Johnston