Registered sgn-* tags

[Doug Ewell]

Going through the tags registered under RFC 3066 but "superseded" under
draft-04, I noticed that while most are language + script or language +
variant combinations, as expected, there is also this block of 19 (or
18) language + region combinations representing the sign languages.

Would these not have been valid under the generative grammar of RFC
3066?  We have sgn-BR for Brazilian Sign Language, sgn-CO for Colombian
Sign Language, and so forth.  How does this differ from "Sign Languages
as used in Brazil," "Sign Languages as used in Colombia," etc. which
would be the interpretation according to the generative grammar?

I wasn't on this list when they were registered, so I missed the
discussion.  Can someone summarize it for me?  I'm just trying to
understand why it was felt necessary to register them instead of letting
them be generated.

Of course, the "extended" language tags sgn-BE-fr, sgn-BE-nl, and
sgn-CH-de are a different matter.  They don't follow the grammar of
either RFC 3066 or draft-04, so there was no choice; they had to be
registered under the former and grandfathered into the latter.

Thanks for any insight,

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