Re: Variant subtag proposal: Høgnorsk variety ofNorwegian

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Sun Jan 3 05:51:28 CET 2010


Hi -

> From: "Leif Halvard Silli" <xn--mlform-iua at xn--mlform-iua.no>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 4:51 PM
> Subject: Re: Variant subtag proposal: Høgnorsk variety ofNorwegian
...
> Unless 'nn-hognorsk' breaks my application, then 'no' isn't as sensible
> as prefix as 'nn' is. But if 'nn-hognorsk' breaks my application, then
> 'no' is a sensible alternative prefix.

No, it is not.  The point of using language tags in the manner of BCP 47
is *interoperability*.   From that perspective, tagging material with
'nn-hognorsk' will exhibit far better matching / filtering properties.

...
> For instance, I may need to discern between 'nn' and 'nn-hognorsk', but
> something breaks so it that 'nn-hognorsk' doesn't work as expected. In
> a given, practical situation, I could decide to reserve a bare naked
> 'no' for Høgnorsk. So then I don't understand why one can't state that
> it then would be perfectly sane to use 'no-hognorsk' as well.

The problem is that 'no' does not mean "Høgnorsk".  It means "any kind of
Norwegian".  There are times when this is useful and sufficient, as
in the case of a collection which contains Norwegian material, but lacks
a tagger with any knowledge of that language.  Using 'no-hognorsk' would
*not* foster interoperability.  It's a kludge that might do what you want
it to within the context of a particular (arguably broken) system, but
not something that should be encouraged, since it would impair interoperability.

Randy




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