language subtag registration request: Region EU

[Peter Constable]

> From: Tex Texin [mailto:tex at yahoo-inc.com]


> > While there may be ambiguity regarding the meaning of "EU"
> > used in isolation, there's no ambiguity whatsoever regarding
> > "fen-EU": it's Fenestrian as used within the EU.
> 
> Peter, whether it is ambiguous depends on how the language is used in the
> countries that are added.
> For example, if we use a subtag for South America in conjunction with
> Spanish, and then we add central America and
> in particular Mexico to the "S. America Union", then the Spanish language
> for this region will need to adapt to the fact that Mexico uses different
> Spanish words from South America.
> 
> Consider also defining English as spoken in the U.S. and Mexico, and lets
> imagine that Canada is then added to the mix. Now we have to accommodate
> spelling and wording changes if we are going to define the language for
> the
> region.
> Add the U.K. to the "region" for additional fun. When you "table" an
> agenda
> item in this region, do you add it or remove it? ;-)
> 
> I am presuming in these examples, that language for a "union" is handled
> similar to Spanish for Latin America, where localizers try to find the
> common denominator and the most acceptable terms and spellings for the
> region.

I guess possible scenarios can be grouped into three types:

1) fen is a language with limited geographic range, spoken only in FE and maybe one or two neighbouring countries

2) fen is a language spoken over a wide geographic range, like English or Spanish, and the usage within EU is defined by some EU-level entity

3) fen is a language spoken over a wide geographic range, like English or Spanish, but there is no controlled EU usage; fen-EU is a common-denominator used by localizers

The changing nature of EU has greater potential impact against the last type of scenario than the first two.



> An alternative is to define a superset of the spellings and terms used in
> the region, treating them all as part of the language.
> 
> The former approach is good for localization. The latter is good if you
> are
> creating a dictionary representing the "language" of the region (and all
> its
> "dialects").
> 
> tex
> 



Peter Constable