Registration request for new subtags for Portuguese orthographies

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Fri Mar 20 04:47:45 CET 2015


Michael:

Where does BCP 5646 stipulate that a wordlist must be provided? It doesn't! Where are the wordlists of all the various registered subtags?

You appear to be making the mistake (as you have done before) that the intent of BCP 47 language tags is to catalog linguistic entities. That is not its purpose. Rather, the purpose is to provide metadata elements that are declarations on the part of authors as to the linguistic nature of content, or to express user linguistic preferences. Just as in the case of "Latin American Spanish", whether or not there is an objectively identifiable definition or consensus regarding what wordlist conforms to "Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990" is not a necessary requirement. Rather, what matters is that there are authors who would like to characterize their content as "pt-ao1990" --- that is, as Portuguese with spelling based on Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990 --- and users who would like to indicate a preference for the same.

The request is not coming from an interest in extending some catalog or from some hypothetical usage scenario. The request is coming from real needs in data interchange.

It would be reasonable to ask if there is any reliable source for a representative wordlist for Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa de 1990, as that would be a useful reference to include in the registration. But I don't see a reason to object to the requested registration if the same cannot be provided.



Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Ietf-languages [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Michael Everson
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 3:04 PM
To: ietflang IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: Registration request for new subtags for Portuguese orthographies

On 19 Mar 2015, at 21:51, Andrew Glass (WINDOWS) <Andrew.Glass at microsoft.com> wrote:

> Michael, is the full text of the reform authoritative?
> 
> http://www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/?action=acordo&version=1990

It’s a guideline. It’s not an instantiation. There is a real question as to how well, where, and how widely this “Acordo” which has been controversial from the beginning has been implemented. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

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