Counting Heads

[Addison Phillips]

>
>
>
>I suppose I should have been clearer.  Of course "1901" is not a script.
>What I meant to say was, since RFC 3066 specifies that two-letter second
>subtags are ISO 3166-1 country codes, the country code (if present)
>should always be the second subtag.  In other words, the precedent (if
>any) set by "de-AT-1901" is not:
>
>    language-country-script
>
>but rather:
>
>    language-country-other_stuff
>
I find it useful to think of it as "language[*-orthography]" rather than 
"country" or "other_stuff".

If you look at most of the registered tags, not just the year-numbered 
German ones, this distinction actually works. Each subtag in sucession 
from left-to-right is a more specific orthographical distinction. That 
is, 1901 is not a year, it is a minor variation in the orthography of 
de-AT, which itself is a variation of de. The fact that most of the 
orthographic distinctions are country codes should not, I think, obscure 
the fact that they represent spelling, vocabulary, grammatical or other 
linguistic differences, not national boundaries per-se.

When viewed through that telescope, the question is whether the 
insertion of script tags should occur before or after the orthographic 
distinction. I agree generally with Doug and John that script is far 
more important than, say, spelling or dialect in most cases, but I also 
suspect that at least a couple of counter examples can probably be cited 
(zh-hakka has already been cited as possibly one such). Languages are 
too messy for that not to happen!

Addison

-- 

Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
webMethods, Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.

[Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force]
http://www.w3.org/International/ws