registration requests re Portuguese

David Starner prosfilaes at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 08:38:09 CEST 2015


On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 3:37 AM, Yury <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not lang+region, however. The lang+region combination is just a relic of
> olden informatics days.

For en-US and en-UK, nds-DE and nds-NL, and at least up to now, pt-BR
and pt-PT, the language+region combination has served to distinguish
dialects that many users felt needed distinguishing.

While most programs have gone with one English localization, there are
a number of programs that have specific localizations for en-UK and
en-CA, with en usually being en-US. I don't see the differences
getting resolved anytime, given common notorious British and American
attitudes about the subject. One could have en-general_british and
en-general_american to separate out "Alice is beginnin te git right
weary o sittin wi her sister" and friends from the much more similar
standard languages, but it doesn't really cause a problem in practice;
they work right now and have no replacement.

I vaguely get the impression with nds-DE and nds-NL that they are two
mostly arbitrary chunks of an unstandardized dialect family. It works
in that the users are willing to accept the division, and I don't
think the translation/Wikipedia projects using the division could
tolerate a much finer division. Given the hatred I've seen for the ISO
639-3 German minority language division, I think nds-DE and nds-NL
have the advantage of existing as divisions (even if they aren't the
best divisions) and being relatively uncontroversial.

In an optimal world, maybe we would have a family of tags for the
various divisions of standard English and other divisions where region
tags are used. But language variants are hugely complex and easy to do
wrong and what we have works; while a number of people care enough to
distinguish between en-US and en-UK and en-CA, nobody cares to
register the standard dialects versus the many unstandardized
dialects, with a few exceptions (most notably en-scottish, which is a
region tag anyway.)

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.


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