LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Fri Apr 11 12:58:50 CEST 2003


Mark,

--On torsdag, april 10, 2003 17:02:13 -0700 Mark Davis 
<mark.davis at jtcsv.com> wrote:

>> >  > An even more general concern: Is there anything in az-latn-az that
>> >>  is different from az-latn (and same for Cyrillic)? In other words,
>> >>  do we need az-latn-az (and similar for uz and sp) at all?
>
> 1. ICU would like to use RFC-3066 codes to distinguish languages.
> 2. There are major systems that distinguish written languages on the above
> basis (with the country code for orthographies), systems that ICU must
> interwork with.

query for information: Can you name some of these, and tell us whether they 
actually have ortographies that are different for the 2 cases?

it would be a bit strange to go to a lot of trouble to register az-Cyrl-AZ 
only to discover that in the systems we wanted to be compatible with, 
az-Cyrl and az-Cyrl-AZ were treated identically in practice....

(azeri may be too obscure to have these differences. Feel free to switch to 
another example.)

> 3. For ICU to be able to do (1), the RFC-3066 codes have to be able to
> also distinguish the languages in (2).
> 4. Using the country code to distinguish orthographies is *not* a new
> concept; RFC-3066 permits that with *any* combination of ISO 639 code.
> 5. Why should the Azeri with Latin script be permitted fewer distinctions
> than English or other languages?

then again, if the current distinction doesn't matter, is there a reason to 
maintain it? (we can always come back and register it if it does matter... 
but we have deliberately not allowed unregistering a tag.... once it's 
published, it's published.)

> The only reason why ICU to be broken would be if RFC-3066 did not allow it
> to make the distinctions it needs to in order to interoperate. The only
> other choice would be for ICU itself to used codes "based on", but not
> identical to RFC 3066, and leave others to deal with the differences. Of
> course, we would prefer not to do that.

agreed.




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