Criteria for languages?

[Mark Davis ☕]

It is the lack of a uniform policy that bothers me more than the particular
case. Anything that is Walliserdeutsch right now would be either tagged "de"
(because that was all that was available until gsw was encoded) or "gsw".
Let's take precisely your wording and apply it to that case.

If an application requires standard *Swiss German* and *Walliserdeutsch* to
be treated as distinct
languages, then clearly it would need to use the new subtag to identify
standard
Swiss German, since "gsw" would mean "any kind of *Swiss German*, including
*Walliserdeutsch*".   This
is a natural consequence of our "no narrowing" rules - all of the data which
is
currently precisely and accurately tagged as *Swiss German* would remain
accurately
tagged, though most would no longer be precisely tagged.  (Data for which
the
tagger was unable to make a determination whether it was *Swiss German* or *
Walliserdeutsch*
would remain precisely tagged.)  The assumption is that it is better to
introduce
a (potentially lingering) imprecision in the tagging of legacy data, rather
than to
cause any once-accurate tags on legacy data to become incorrect.

If your reasoning is correct for Latvian, then it is also correct for Swiss
German! If it is not correct for Swiss German, then it is not correct for
Latvian.

Mark


On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 09:46, Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>wrote:

> Hi -
>
> > From: "John Cowan" <cowan at ccil.org>
> > To: "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>
> > Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>; "Doug Ewell" <doug at ewellic.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 9:29 AM
> > Subject: Re: Criteria for languages?
> ...
>
> > Peter Constable scripsit:
> >
> > > If the denotation of "lav" were changed to explicitly exclude Latgalian
> > > (which would be necessary if its scope is not set to macrolanguage),
> > > then an unknown number of librarians will have broken data. It would
> > > be irresponsible of the ISO 639-RA/JAC to do such a thing, IMO.
> >
> > Quite so.
> >
> > In that case, the issue for us is: do we recommend that people continue
> > to use "lav" for Latvian proper, or that they adopt the new subtag?
>
> If an application requires standard Latvian and Latgalian to be treated as
> distinct
> languages, then clearly it would need to use the new subtag to identify
> standard
> Latvian, since "lav" would mean "any kind of Latvian, including Latgalian".
>   This
> is a natural consequence of our "no narrowing" rules - all of the data
> which is
> currently precisely and accurately tagged as Latvian would remain
> accurately
> tagged, though most would no longer be precisely tagged.  (Data for which
> the
> tagger was unable to make a determination whether it was Latvian or
> Latgalian
> would remain precisely tagged.)  The assumption is that it is better to
> introduce
> a (potentially lingering) imprecision in the tagging of legacy data, rather
> than to
> cause any once-accurate tags on legacy data to become incorrect.
>
> Randy
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/attachments/20091201/66cfe53b/attachment-0001.htm