<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/12/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Michael Everson</b> <<a href="mailto:everson@evertype.com">everson@evertype.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
At 16:49 -0800 2006-12-12, Mark Davis wrote:<br><br>>So "Middle Cornish" refers to the language of the fourteenth and<br>>fifteenth centuries, for example. This doesn't mean that Middle<br>>Cornish was unchanging during that period, of course, and a scholar
<br>>could well want to refer to the typically language of the 14th<br>>century vs the 15th century. Now, of course, we could go down the<br>>line of saying that every time a scholar wants to refer to something<br>
>on a century level s/he has to go cap in hand to M. Everson and<br>>convince him that some unique name should be attached to that<br>>variant, or we could provide a mechanism that lets people tag what<br>>they want without so doing.
<br><br>Yeah, right. It's 01:00 and I'm going to have to deal with this<br>tomorrow, but you DON'T know anything about Middle Cornish, and it<br>DOESN'T fit into this kind of neat-and-tidy century box. Accordingly,<br>I am suspicious of neat and tidy boxes. However appealing such
<br>"quick-and-dirty white-board" ideas might seem "good" to M. Davis, it<br>is the case that M. Everson does his job with some diligence, and<br>wishes to make sure we do not make a hames of this RFC.
</blockquote><div><br>Dr Davis is looking forward the the explanation from Mr Everson as to why a generative region is so much better than a generative variant, eg that fr-FR, fr-BE, or fr-CH is so much better defined than fr-1500s, and hoping that it will not simply be an ad hominem argument.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">And you didn't say anything about the other 19 centuries CE or the<br>BCE centuries either.
</blockquote><div><br>With the addition of 7,000 new language subtags, all else pales in magnitude. But it also doesn't mean that every century would get its variant; just that if someone can make a reasonable case that in one or more languages a designation by century makes sense, then a variant for that century could be encoded. It may even be the case that it is limited by prefix, as 4646 requires.
<br><br>And I didn't say that I was wedded to this idea, just that I have some sympathy for it, to the point that it is worth exploring, not dismissing out of hand without playing out the pros and cons.<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
--<br>Michael Everson * <a href="http://www.evertype.com">http://www.evertype.com</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>Ietf-languages mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no">Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no
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