suppress-script values for fil, mi, pes, prs, qu members
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Wed Oct 20 16:01:26 CEST 2010
I appreciate Peter's quoting of relevant background material that led to
the adoption of Suppress-Script, as opposed to Require-Script or no
mechanism at all.
As clerk, I don't have a problem with preparing 48 sets of forms and
records for these.
As an individual contributor, I'm concerned about the apparent precedent
that would be set, in terms of trying to be comprehensive with S-S.
As Peter and others have noted, our knowledge is limited as to which
languages are overwhelmingly written in one script, and which script
that is. Additionally, we have incomplete agreement among ourselves on
the meaning of "overwhelming." And the adoption of S-S was also
influenced by resistance against the placement of the script subtag
before region, because remove-from-right parsers built for RFC 1766/3066
usage would not know to match "en-Latn-US" with "en-US".
So we've more or less settled on a conservative approach that takes into
account whether the language tag would have been used in the RFC
1766/3066 era—thus effectively excluding subtags introduced with ISO
639-3—and whether the ietf-languages consensus on "overwhelming" is
basically unanimous and unassailable. For some of the S-S additions
proposed by Peter, such as every language encompassed by Quechua, the
second criterion is probably met, but I'm not sure about the first.
Currently we have 7844 language subtags, 134 of which have S-S. Adding
48 more (a 35% increase) does not pose any architectural problems, but
could send us down a perfectionist rabbit hole where each and every
language is subject to the S-S debate. Ethnologue says that speakers of
Bozaba ('bzo', population 5500) in the DRC "also use Lingala mainly in
the market." Since Lingala has an S-S of 'Latn', does it follow that
Bozaba should as well? Writers might be unlikely to use different
scripts for the two. Who wants to get involved in this debate?
If we want to try to be more comprehensive with S-S assignments, that's
fine, but we'd better understand what we're getting into, and not be
surprised when the requests start coming in one by one, or in flash
floods.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
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