preliminary registration proposal for variant subtags "gendmale", "gendfem", "gendneut"

[Peter Constable]

By audience here, I don’t mean that the content directly reflects in any way that someone of a particular gender is being spoken to. Rather, what I mean is that, e.g., my application resources include a content item that may be intended for presentation to a user that has indicated a preference for that content.

It’s the same as the distinction between saying “this string is in the Colombian variant of Spanish” versus “this string is intended for presentation to users preferring any Latin America variety of Spanish.” One is characterizing the linguistic nature of the content itself, while the other is characterizing the linguistic nature of the intended audience. For application resources, you may want to (and, I think, should) qualify assets in terms of the intended audience.


Peter

From: mark.edward.davis at gmail.com [mailto:mark.edward.davis at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mark Davis ?
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 3:55 PM
To: Peter Constable
Cc: ietflang IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: preliminary registration proposal for variant subtags "gendmale", "gendfem", "gendneut"

That's useful to have it in concrete form.

1. I don't think we need the neutral form; that would just be the absence of a variant.

2. I really don't like conflating the source with the audience; those are two *very* different purposes. For comparison, in our software we have gender support with three cases 'male', 'female', and 'other' (where 'other' means that the gender is unknown or unavailable). You can have a message like "Welcome" which is translated differently depending on whether the reader/listener is male, female, or other; *not* whether the speaker is male or female. Example:

[SELECT_VIEWER_GENDER]
 [MALE]Benvenuto, [NAME]
 [FEMALE]Benvenuta, [NAME]
 [OTHER]Ti diamo il benvenuto,[NAME]
[END_SELECT]

On the other hand, you have Japanese phrasing that would be appropriate for the gender of the *author/speaker*, not the the gender of the reader/listener. And of course, there are other combinations, like where the message depends on the gender of a third person:

[SELECT_GENDER]
 [MALE]You can always unblock him later.
 [FEMALE]You can always unblock her later.
 [OTHER]You can always unblock this person later.
[END_SELECT]

I think the only real case that can be made for a BCP47 tag is for distinctions in language that are associated with the gender of the speaker. And that should be very clear from not only the description, but also the subtag. So I'd suggest changes like the following:

OLD
      Subtag: gendmale
      Description: male gender
      Prefix: *
      Comments:
      To be used for capturing a gender distinction in relation
      to the source of content (e.g., ‘Czech as spoken by a
      male’) or the target audience for content (e.g.,
       ‘applicable to a male Czech user’).
NEW
      Subtag: msource
      Description: male source
      Comments: Indicates a variant of content (speech or text)
      that would only be appropriate coming from a male speaker/writer.





Mark<https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033>

— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —


On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com<mailto:petercon at microsoft.com>> wrote:
To rein in the discussion from things I think are off-topic and out of scope, particularly complexities across the world’s languages in relation to grammatical gender, I’m sending draft requests to capture what I _do_ intend the scope of consideration to be.

(These encompass the male/female/neutral gender distinctions. In my original male, I did also mention ‘child’ as potentially related in terms of speech UI resources; I’ll leave that aside for now, though mention again here in case it’s a factor in how the gender distinctions are considered.)

This is not a formal proposal: I’m still looking for discussion on the idea generally to see if it’s a useful thing to consider at all.

Also, my statement on scope above is not intended to rule out separate discussion of other distinctions such as level of formality (e.g., tutoyer vs. vouvoyer). My thoughts on that are different than for gender, but it is a separate topic.

----------------------------
  LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
   1. Name of requester: Peter Constable
   2. E-mail address of requester: petercon at microsoft.com<mailto:petercon at microsoft.com>
   3. Record Requested:

      Type: variant
      Subtag: gendmale
      Description: male gender
      Prefix: *
      Comments:

      To be used for capturing a gender distinction in relation
      to the source of content (e.g., ‘Czech as spoken by a
      male’) or the target audience for content (e.g.,
       ‘applicable to a male Czech user’).

   4. Intended meaning of the subtag: male gender
   5. Reference to published description
      of the language (book or article):
   6. Any other relevant information:

      This subtag is not intended for capturing grammatical
      Gender of wordforms, morphemes or other such usage
      pertaining to grammatical gender. An utterance may use
      wordforms or inflections of a particular grammatical
      gender by virtue of it being spoken by or addressed to
      a person of a particular gender, and so the notion of
      grammatical gender is not entirely unrelated. However,
      the intent is to capture a characterization of the
      speaker or target audience for a content item and not
      a characterization of the grammatical or morphological
      structure of elements within the content.

      An exemplary application would be in tailoring of user
      Interface elements in a software product or personal
      information device. For example, user-interface strings
      or speech assets may be provided with male and female
      variants, to be selected according to a user preference.


----------------------------
  LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
   1. Name of requester: Peter Constable
   2. E-mail address of requester: petercon at microsoft.com<mailto:petercon at microsoft.com>
   3. Record Requested:

      Type: variant
      Subtag: gendfem
      Description: female gender
      Prefix: *
      Comments:

      To be used for capturing a gender distinction in relation
      to the source of content (e.g., ‘Czech as spoken by a
      female’) or the target audience for content (e.g.,
       ‘applicable to a female Czech user’).

   4. Intended meaning of the subtag: female gender
   5. Reference to published description
      of the language (book or article):
   6. Any other relevant information:

      This subtag is not intended for capturing grammatical
      Gender of wordforms, morphemes or other such usage
      pertaining to grammatical gender. An utterance may use
      wordforms or inflections of a particular grammatical
      gender by virtue of it being spoken by or addressed to
      a person of a particular gender, and so the notion of
      grammatical gender is not entirely unrelated. However,
      the intent is to capture a characterization of the
      speaker or target audience for a content item and not
      a characterization of the grammatical or morphological
      structure of elements within the content.

      An exemplary application would be in tailoring of user
      Interface elements in a software product or personal
      information device. For example, user-interface strings
      or speech assets may be provided with male and female
      variants, to be selected according to a user preference.


----------------------------
  LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM
   1. Name of requester: Peter Constable
   2. E-mail address of requester: petercon at microsoft.com<mailto:petercon at microsoft.com>
   3. Record Requested:

      Type: variant
      Subtag: gendneut
      Description: neutral gender
      Prefix: *
      Comments:

      To be used for capturing a gender distinction in relation
      to the source of content (e.g., ‘Czech as spoken by either
      a male or a female’) or the target audience for content
      (e.g., ‘applicable to a male or female Czech user’).

   4. Intended meaning of the subtag: neutral gender
   5. Reference to published description
      of the language (book or article):
   6. Any other relevant information:

      This subtag is not intended for capturing grammatical
      Gender of wordforms, morphemes or other such usage
      pertaining to grammatical gender. An utterance may use
      wordforms or inflections of a particular grammatical
      gender by virtue of it being spoken by or addressed to
      a person of a particular gender, and so the notion of
      grammatical gender is not entirely unrelated. However,
      the intent is to capture a characterization of the
      speaker or target audience for a content item and not
      a characterization of the grammatical or morphological
      structure of elements within the content.

      An exemplary application would be in tailoring of user
      Interface elements in a software product or personal
      information device. For example, user-interface strings
      or speech assets may be provided with male and female
      variants, to be selected according to a user preference.


----------------------------



Peter

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