LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: Slovene

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Mon Apr 30 02:03:04 CEST 2012


Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

> I don't think this is within our scope. ISO 639 can add such a
> synonym, can they not?
> I don't want to get into the business of adding such synonyms.
> There are a zillion of them.

and "Phillips, Addison" <addison at lab126 dot com> wrote:

> It's permitted, but RFC 5646 tries hard to discourage such
> registrations for the reason you cite. In particular, the RFC says:
>
> Attempts to provide translations or transcriptions of entries in the
> registry (which, by definition, provide no new information) are
> unlikely to be approved.
>
> [Admittedly, this isn't a translation, but it doesn't seem to me to
> rise to the level of "adding new information" necessary to
> disambiguate the subtag.]

I worked offline with Tomaž on these registration proposals over the 
last couple of weeks, and I agreed with him that the alternate use of 
"Slovenian" and "Slovene" seemed widespread and well-defined, and not 
really something that there are a zillion of. I think this is more like 
Spanish/Castilian, Catalan/Valencian, Kirghiz/Kyrgyz, Ossetian/Ossetic, 
and a small set of others.

The English-language Wikipedia uses both terms in body text, but uses 
"Slovene language" as its main headword and redirects "Slovenian 
language" to it.

It may be that this is a job for ISO 639 and not us, but I don't agree 
that it falls into the category of "translations or transcriptions" that 
RFC 5646 is talking about. Those who worked on 5646 and 4646 will recall 
that the goal there was to avoid this kind of rabbit hole:

Description: German
Description: Deutsch
Description: Allemand
Description: Alemán
Description: Tedesco
Description: Неме́цкий
Description: لغة ألمانية
etc.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­ 



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