Portuguese subtags (was: RE: Ietf-languages Digest, Vol 104, Issue 15)

João Miguel Neves joao at silvaneves.org
Fri Sep 16 08:55:03 CEST 2011


Em 16-09-2011 06:05, Philip Newton escreveu:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 00:02, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
>> I don't know Portuguese, so I can't comment on the worthiness of these
>> proposals from a linguistic perspective.  But this is starting to feel
>> like an effort to use legal technicalities to reject the proposals on
>> the basis of not liking the reforms.  I hope I am reading the situation
>> wrong.
> My interpretation of the opposition, for what it's worth, was that the
> 1990 orthography is not a single, defined entity in the sense that
> it's possible to independently create, say, a spelling checker which
> will unambiguously label a given word or text as "conforms to the
> orthography" or "does not conform to the orthography". In that sense,
> the mention of Scouse is probably useful: it may not be necessary for
> a variant to be described with 100% exactness for it to be useful.
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
Well, there are several spellcheckers (distinguishing spellcheckers in
software to allow both orthographies to be available is my main reason
to go ahead with this) and an official vocabulary containing 182 030
words. So I don't think the "100% exactness" even applies to this case.

I could dwell forever on the errors that are probably in those
vocabularies, but the fact is that the orthography is different, it's
being used, and it's getting enforced on the public education system
this month and on the public administration in 3 months in Portugal.
Brazil's public administration implemented it more than one year ago.
Any Portuguese reader is noting the difference between ortographies
(which is the reason I'm shipping two different spellcheckers).

People seem to get sidetracked by political issues, like whether the
linguistic community likes a change or not, more than if there are
references or if the ortography change is relevant. Those eventually
appeared in the discussion and I think I corrected/handled those, but
noting that there is an orthography that needs to be tagged doesn't make
me an expert nor a defender of such an orthography. I'm just someone who
needs to deal with the fact it exists.

Best regards,
João Miguel Neves


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