BCP47 Appeals process

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Thu Sep 18 07:56:41 CEST 2008


Hi -

> From: "Yury Tarasievich" <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com>
> To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 10:24 PM
> Subject: Re: BCP47 Appeals process
... 
> Anyway, if we are talking precedent, the French subtags are happily 
> using "generic" "year-acad" subtags, as far as I know. I'll have yet to 
> see good reason for Belarusian ones to not to.

I think the heart of the question is this: how broadly or narrowly does the
requester want to categorize these variants?  Specific possibilities
include:
    - a fairly broad subtag covering all varieties of Belarusian that have
      at one time or another been "blessed" by the academy.  For this case,
      it makes sense to *not* include the year.
    - a fairly narrow subtag covering only a specific variety of Belarussian,
      as defined by the academy at some specific point in time.  For this,
      it clearly makes sense to include the year.
   - a subtag covering multiple, but not all, varieties "blessed" in the past,
     present, or future by the academy. 

There currently are no "generic" year subtags.  All the "year" subtags have
prefix fields binding them to a specific language.  Though there is no
formal prohibition against doing "generic" variants, there has been a
marked reluctance to define them.  I think part of the reluctance comes
from the ambiguity doing so would give the the variant records, particularly
if the description fields are not constructed with extreme care to define
exactly what the variant subtag might mean in each of the contexts in
which it might appear.

Randy



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