Registration of el-Latn language tag

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On onsdag, september 28, 2005 04:19:18 -0700 Tex Texin <tex at xencraft.com> 
wrote:

> It's a good reason not to Register generative tags.
>
> So when someone requests a tag now, what is the reviewer to look at?
>
> We used to identify a few representative books, which I always thought
> meant we were identifying a particular set of rules around the language
> (spelling, orthography).
>
> The registration for el-Latn more or less stipulates the need for
> transliteration, mentions that they exist, with  a link to a site that
> collects transliteration systems. (Which btw, I think is a really bad idea
> in the event the site goes away or completely changes its list of
> reference materials.) But it doesn't really nail down what it is. (It
> mentions a standard, but doesn't say the tag is referring to that
> particular standard.
>
> So we are no longer identifying a reference or a particular language, but
> just the concept that there seems to be something like a language of this
> persuasion. I guess we were asking for this with es-419. (Which I was
> also a proponent of.)

Yep.

For this particular request, one reason why I don't care much what the 
registration says is that we have a community consensus that anyone using a 
tag consisting of a 639 language and a script doesn't have to register it - 
he can just use it if he thinks it's appropriate for his content.

So we'd better get used to a world where we encounter tags of that nature.

Translation is not a new subject for this list - transliteration warranted 
a section in Peter Constable's 2002 SIL report 
<http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn8/SILEWP2002-003.pdf>, and I've found 
mention of transliteration in the archives in 1998. (Google doesn't seem to 
search the old archives consistently, however.. I'd better move them....)