Variant subtag proposal: Høgnorsk variety of Norwegian

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Sat Jan 2 01:55:31 CET 2010


Leif Halvard Silli scripsit:

> (Resending. Seems I should have used @alvesterand instead of @iana.org.)

Either one will work.  As for "Alvesterand", is that a mere typo, or legitimate
language variation?  :-)

> Previously, I don't know if it was in the LTRU group or one of the i18n 
> mailinglists of w3.org, someone recommended that one should use 'no' as 
> little as possible, and instead use 'nn' and 'nb'. I agree with this. 
> That would solve many problems. But there are legitimate practical 
> reasons for using 'no' - regardless of which variant of Norwegian 
> (including subvariants such as Høgnorsk) one uses. Of course, there are 
> also activist reasons for using 'no' - whether you use 'no' about 
> Nynorsk or Bokmål.

It depends on the audience.  I see four plausible audiences: those who
desire nb and not nn; those who desire nn and not nb; those who do not
care what they get but wish it to be tagged correctly; those who
do not care what they get and do not care about correct tagging either.
On the Web, at least, the first group should set their preference for
'no' or 'nb'; the second for 'nn'; the other two for 'no' or 'nb' or 'nn'.
Therefore, if you are writing nn and care about the second group at all,
you should probably use nn rather than no.

> And I don't see any official recommendation anywhere to stop using
> 'no'. (But of course, the minority often becomes the "correctest".)

You are unlikely to see any such recommendations.

-- 
What is the sound of Perl?  Is it not the       John Cowan
sound of a [Ww]all that people have stopped     cowan at ccil.org
banging their head against?  --Larry            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan


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