FW: LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORMS

[Doug Ewell]

Mark Davis <mark dot davis at jtcsv dot com> wrote:

> As you and many other people have said, the ISO code representing
> Serbian (for example) is *entirely* divorced from written form. That
> means that when I am *matching* languages, it matches any Serbian, no
> matter what script it is written in. When one is matching, there is NO
> notion of "default".
>
> But that means that if I do want to match documents with only Serbian
> written in Cyrllic, and not all possible Serbian documents, then I
> need to have a separate code for that.

In the light of arguments like this, can somebody please remind me why
it's such a bad idea to let script subtags be productive?

It seems to me that would solve the problem Mark described, and
acknowledge that a language can be written in a script other than its
"default" (i.e. Hindi in Latin, Taiwanese in Latin) while taking the
burden off the Reviewer to find a justification for each such
possibility.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/