Subtag for indicating "marked" text?

[Doug Ewell]

Sascha Brawer wrote:

> What would you think of registering an IETF language variant subtag
> to denote text with marks for tones, gemination, vowel length, vowel
> quality, etc. in languages where such marks are not part of the
> regular spelling?

Until recently, there was pushback against registering variant subtags
whose meaning could be this different, depending on the language to
which applied. The registration of 'simple' last year was somewhat of a
change in attitudes, but I think this scenario goes even beyond that.

I'm not opposing this request so much as suggesting that we ought to
take a good look at why we rejected requests like this in the past, and
what is different now to make us change our minds.

Note that we already have 'monoton' and 'polyton' to handle the similar
Greek case.

> Description: Used to designate text with markers for tones,
> gemination, vowel length, vowel quality, etc. in languages where
> such marks are not part of the regular spelling

At the very least, can we try for a shorter Description field, one which
might fit reasonably in a list presented to users? The longer
explanation can always go into a Comments field.

The longest Description fields we currently have are for the Portuguese
orthographic variants (because the descriptions are duplicated in
English and Portuguese, for whatever reason) and for the grandfathered
tag "zh-min-nan" (because it was registered in 2001 under RFC 3066 and
the language has many names, which would be separate Description fields
today).

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org