LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM: iu-Cans
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Fri Feb 4 10:55:35 CET 2005
At 22:34 -0800 2005-02-03, Peter Constable wrote:
>I cannot predict when a user will determine that iu-Cans-CA needs to
>be distinguished from (say) iu-Cans-US.
There aren't any communities of Inuktitut speakers in the US using
Syllabics in any way that would make it differ from such communities
in Canada.
So... you want to proliferate a set of duplicate tags, all with the
same referent?
Apparently I have no choice but to approve all of these, because they
will be implicit in this RFC's successors, and obviously they refer
to real things. But I dislike the duplicate encodings.
>how do we know when a country ID is useful or not?
When it helps make a genuine distinction?
>Add to that the potential to get users offended by geo-political
>issues: "you consider that community to exist independent of any
>nation, yet you tie us to country X". For many reasons, we really
>cannot take on making judgments about
>precisely what the correct tags for users' needs will be.
So we should register every blessed possible combination of tags?
>Keep in mind that users' needs aren't consistently the same: if someone
>asks for an RFC3066 tag that would apply to (e.g.) the "French (France)"
>locale,
RFC3066 tags specify languages.
>we have no way of knowing whether, in the particular context
>they want to use the tag, the best tag would be "fr" or "fr-FR".
>Sometimes it will be one, but other times it will be the other.
That is not in any way analogous to Inuktitut. All iu is spoken in
Canada. There is a writing system difference: iu-Latn and iu-Cans
make sense. iu-Cyrl and iu-Hebr do not. iu-Cans-CA and iu-Latn-CA
(which you did not request) are redundant.
There are orthographic differences between Nunavut Inuktitut and
Nunavik Inuttitut [sic] which use Cans that *would* be relevant for
tagging.
>Also, I think the reluctance to register a tag like iu-Cans-CA is
>mistaken on other grounds: we are not obligated to determine that every
>valid tag denotes something distinct from every other valid tag.
We are in ISO 639, and this RFC provides extensions to that.
>That is already impossible, since RFC 3066 defines many things as valid that
>would not correspond to actual linguistic distinctions.
Such as?
>I suspect that there's no distinction between fr-CI and fr-GH, but
>both are valid tags, and probably in use somewhere.
That's still no reason to encode iu-Cans-CA as distinct from... well, nothing.
>In a case like "iu-Cans-CA", it is clear what the intended meaning is
>(even if it wasn't stated explicitly in the registration form), it there
>are sufficiently-clear ways in which it can be used.
It is clear that it is identical to iu-Cans, anyway.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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