Current requests

[Doug Ewell]

Re: Current requests

On May 15, Luc Pardon wrote:

> I'd like to invite the list members to explicitly state their opinion
> on this widening, even if they have done so before.

and I assume that extends to both of his requests.

	1. I am in favor of replacing the three "pt-XX" prefixes with "Prefix:
pt".

BCP 47 discourages tag creators from including region subtags when they
are not needed. The effect of having these three region-specific
prefixes, for users who wish to adhere to BCP 47 recommendations and use
'ao1990' only with recommended prefixes, is to force the inclusion of a
region subtag which may not be needed to identify the linguistic
content.

The main argument for three prefixes has been that "AO1990 as
implemented in country A" is substantially different from "AO1990 as
implemented in country B," but I still have not seen evidence that the
differences are great enough to demand region subtags, beyond what any
other differences between Portuguese as used in different countries
would demand.

Arguments about whether and where AO1990 is "official" do not matter to
me. BCP 47 is about making available the tags that people and processes
need, regardless of government approval. We also do not want to appear
to be making any statements either "for" or "against" the AO1990
standard, as to how widespread or how unified it is.

	2. I have no strong opinion about adding "Prefix: gl".

This is mainly because I don't know enough about Galician to know
whether it is so close to Portuguese that it can follow, in any sort of
meaningful way, an orthographic standard designed for Portuguese.
Ethnologue says Galician and Portuguese have about 85% intelligibility,
which doesn't help me (if the figure were 99% or 50% it would be
obvious).

I get Peter's point that users can use a variant with any prefix,
including those not specified in the Registry, but we have emphasized in
the past that tag creators really, really should use only the
recommended prefixes. We would be contradicting ourselves to say "wink,
wink" in this case. In this I agree with Luc.

I noticed that Richard Ishida's lookup app [1] issues a comment about
"gl-ao1990" but does not complain about "pt-ao1990" (without region
subtag).

[1] http://r12a.github.io/apps/subtags/

My points above concerning "official" status, and about not making a
statement, apply to the Galician question as well.

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