Preferred-Value for region CS

[Debbie Garside]

Doug wrote:

> Another list member wrote:
> 
> > Plus comment of See RS for Serbia or ME for Montenegro?
> 
> I actually like this idea, and everyone knows how 
> conservative I am about the Comments field.  There will 
> probably be people years from now who still think Serbia and 
> Montenegro are one country (just like the one I talked to six 
> months ago who thought Czechoslovakia still existed), and 
> this sort of comment would help them make the right call.

I support this idea as it is similar to the comment that was included in GB
when GG, IM and JE were added.

Best regards

Debbie Garside

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no 
> [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell
> Sent: 27 September 2006 17:35
> To: ietf-languages at iana.org
> Subject: Preferred-Value for region CS
> 
> I've asked Michael to contact IANA and put a hold on the 
> proposal to deprecate region subtag CS without a 
> Preferred-value, because it has generated some (unfortunately 
> private) questions.
> 
> Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:
> 
> >> It should be evident that neither "Serbia" nor "Montenegro" is a 
> >> suitable replacement for "Serbia and Montenegro."
> >
> > It is not evident at all. Serbia-and-Montenegro, for 
> various reasons 
> > (location of the capital, military and political strength, 
> etc) took 
> > over many of the yugoslav assets such as the top-level domain name 
> > ".yu" (still alive, since ".cs" was never delegated by ICANN).
> >
> > So, giving this habit, and the relative sizes of Serbia and 
> > Montenegro, it is not evident that CS should not have a 
> > preferred-value RS. I do not think that ISO 3166 gives any guidance 
> > here?
> 
> This was analogous to what was done (retroactively) with the 
> subtag SU for Soviet Union.  Russia was the dominant country 
> out of the 15 Soviet successor states, politically and in 
> terms of population, and notably they inherited the Soviet 
> nuclear weapons arsenal.  Despite that, it seemed clear that 
> for language identification purposes, saying that a language 
> was "as spoken in the Soviet Union" did not seem equivalent 
> to "as spoken in Russia" considering the diversity of the 
> area and potential for erasing important distinctions.
> 
> For example, the tag "ug-SU" for "Uighur as spoken in the 
> Soviet Union" 
> would have been reasonable, to distinguish from "ug-AF" or 
> "ug-CN".  But it would be inappropriate to codify an 
> assumption that "ug-SU" was equivalent to "ug-RU" through a 
> Preferred-Value mapping, because most Uighur in the former 
> Soviet Union is spoken in Kazakhstan, not in Russia.
> 
> On a much smaller and probably less linguistically important 
> scale, there is a subtag "NT" for "Neutral Zone," a small 
> no-man's-land between Saudi Arabia and Iraq that was divided 
> more or less equally between the two in the early 1990s.  
> (There's more to the story, but that's the
> idea.)  It would not have made sense for programs or humans 
> to assume that old "Neutral Zone" tagged content should be 
> interpreted either as Saudi Arabia or as Iraq.
> 
> The same danger would exist by mapping "CS" to "RS"; 
> important distinctions related to Montenegrin usage might be 
> inappropriately assumed to be Serbian.
> 
> I agree that ISO 3166 gives no guidance here.  UN M.49 did 
> assign two new codes to replace the one code for Serbia and 
> Montenegro, but that is not really "guidance" about usage 
> going forward.
> 
> Another list member wrote:
> 
> > Plus comment of See RS for Serbia or ME for Montenegro?
> 
> I actually like this idea, and everyone knows how 
> conservative I am about the Comments field.  There will 
> probably be people years from now who still think Serbia and 
> Montenegro are one country (just like the one I talked to six 
> months ago who thought Czechoslovakia still existed), and 
> this sort of comment would help them make the right call.
> 
> On the contrary...
> 
> > So, multiple Preferred-Value fields?
> 
> No, no.  That would be crossing the streams.  Preferred-Value 
> tells the program or human, "Instead of tag or subtag A, you 
> should use B instead."  It wouldn't make sense to say, "... 
> use B or C instead, it's up to you."
> 
> The opposite situation might make sense some day, though: two 
> or more deprecated subtags with the same Preferred-Value.  
> "Instead of A or B, use C instead."
> 
> Remember that Preferred-Value doesn't imply that existing 
> content should be retagged.
> 
> If anyone else has an opinion on Preferred-Value or Comments 
> fields for region CS, or anything related to it, please send 
> them to the list where all 120-odd list members can see them 
> and respond.
> 
> --
> Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  
> UTN #14 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
> http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages 
> 
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