I agree with you that the syntax couldn't be incorporated directly, but we could work around it (not in this group, but in the LTRU group). For example, we could say that variants of the form SUBxxxxx with a prefix containing a region code were reserved for ISO 3166-2 codes. The key issues are relevance, suitability, and stability.
<br><br>Mark<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Doug Ewell</b> <<a href="mailto:dewell@roadrunner.com">dewell@roadrunner.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;">
Mark Davis <mark dot davis at icu dash project dot org> wrote:<br><br>> Add to that list the fundamental reason: there is some reason to use<br>> countries in defining language variants, because the governments are
<br>> often associated with particular policies regarding orthography and<br>> other language variant features. However, that relationship becomes<br>> very tenuous when we look at sub-country boundaries, which are far
<br>> less commonly associated strongly with a particular language variant.<br>> Moreover, where there is such a relationship, it far less likely to be<br>> unique; the same features will be shared among a large set of
<br>> subregions.<br><br>Ninety-nine percent of the time, you are right: the main reason we don't<br>want to get involved with sub-national region subtags is that they don't<br>represent enough of a linguistic difference to be worth tagging.
<br><br>For that one percent of the time when there is a taggable difference,<br>such as we are seeing right now with Scottish English, I feel it's<br>important to point out the technical conflicts between ISO 3166-2 and
<br>the rest of the BCP 47 syntax.<br><br>--<br>Doug Ewell * Fullerton, California, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14<br><a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/">http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/</a><br><a href="http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html">
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</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Mark