Preferred-Value for region CS

Mark Davis mark.davis at icu-project.org
Wed Sep 27 19:42:14 CEST 2006


I agree.

On 9/27/06, Debbie Garside <debbie at ictmarketing.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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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> >
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