registration requests re Portuguese

[Doug Ewell]

Mark Davis 🍹 wrote:

> The prefixes are only advisory anyway; nothing normative. The simplest
> approach is to just make them all have a pt prefix and be done with
> all the Sturm und Drang.
>
>> abl1943: pt
>> colb1945: pt
>> ao1990: pt
>
> It is always up to users to avoid combinations of subtags that are not
> useful, like ja-Ahom-AQ.

This is a good point, and here's an attempt to build on it.

If we register, say, 'ao1990' with a Prefix of "pt", that does not 
prevent, or even remotely discourage, users from using 'ao1990' with 
prefixes that build on "pt". So all of the following would be just fine:

pt-ao1990
pt-PT-ao1990
pt-BR-ao1990
pt-CV-ao1990
pt-AO-ao1990
...

Now, if some of those combinations don't make sense because that 
particular orthography is not used in that country (NOT because the 
country's government didn't ratify it or whatever), then it falls on the 
user not to use dopey tags, as Mark said.

I think our job is to restrict Prefix values to what could reasonably 
make sense. "zh" could never make sense with 'ao1990', so we are not 
talking about adding "zh" as a Prefix or registering them with no 
Prefix.

"pt" by itself could reasonably make sense with these three variants. 
Trying to refine this further takes us out of the realm of "reasonably" 
and into a role that the respective governments (ratification) or 
Ethnologue (compilation of statistics) ought to play.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸