Principles of Operation (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REQUEST FORM,
Erzgebirgisch)
John Cowan
cowan at ccil.org
Wed Jan 30 16:22:47 CET 2008
Doug Ewell scripsit:
> The Registry does not say that 'de' indicates "all varieties of German"
> or that it does not. It says: "Description: German".
The Registry defers to ISO 639/1-2 for the interpretation of this tag,
which isn't much help. When 4646bis is adopted, it will be able to
defer to 639-3, which defers to the Ethnologue, which is very clear
about the meaning: it is Standard German, the language in which Goethe
wrote, the language that Henry Kissinger speaks natively (but poorly),
the language spoken by almost a million people in Kazakhstan.
--
A rose by any other name John Cowan
may smell as sweet, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
but if you called it an onion cowan at ccil.org
you'd get cooks very confused. --RMS
More information about the Ietf-languages
mailing list