xx-XX-nnnn vs. xx-nnnn in Chinese and German

[Torsten Bronger]

Am Donnerstag, 14. Februar 2002 00:12 schrieben Sie:
> At 21:57 +0100 2002-02-13, Torsten Bronger wrote:
> >I need de-AT/DE for the mapping on LaTeX identifiers.  LaTeX has to
> >distinguish, because it generates some text.  E.g. the date:  "Januar" in
> >Germany, "Jänner" in Austria.  So if I write a letter in XML which is
> >converted to LaTeX which then puts in the date -- the country of origin
> >is essential.
>
> The spelling of January in date formats is a locale issue not a
> language tagging issue. 

Granted, but it's convenient to include this into the language tag.  
I mean, nobody would write a letter in Austrian with German date.  As 
would nobody write "neighbour" and "color" in the same text.

> You can already use de_AT and de_DE for that,
> and indeed that is recommended. Are there other differences common
> enough to warrant a language tag?
>
> de-AT and de-DE are legal according to the RFC anyway, as are en-GB
> and en-US and en-IE.

I knew that, and I use them already.  For them, I'd have never 
requested something in this mailing list.

Okay, to make it more concrete:  My typesetting system, LaTeX, uses
UKenglish, USenglish, german, austrian, ngerman and naustrian.  
That's what I have to cope with, I didn't invent them.  In my 
authoring system, an XML application, I have the xml:lang attribute.  
What I need is a subjective mapping, i.e. every LaTeX identifier must 
be reached.

I thought it was sensible to try to do this using *only* xml:lang. 
With the proposed tags, I could encode:

en, en-US                        -->   USenglish
en-GB                            -->   UKenglish
de-1901, de-DE-1901              -->   german
de, de-DE, de-DE-1996, de-1996   -->   ngerman
de-AT-1901                       -->   austrian
de-AT, de-AT-1996                -->   naustrian

(Or try to find better defaults by heuristic methods, but that's
another thing.)

That was my whole motivation for the requests.

Do I abuse xml:lang here?

Bye,
Torsten.