Archival of registration forms

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Wed Apr 25 06:51:09 CEST 2007


Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> That's precisely why it is important to have the final form: 
> understanding "valencia" or "1926baku" currently requires reading many 
> messages in the ietf-languages archive. 12 months from now, it will be 
> quite difficult and problems already discussed on ietf-languages may 
> surface again.

While I have no problem with your main message about archiving the 
registration forms, I disagree with these two specific examples.

Type: variant
Subtag: valencia
Description: Valencian
Added: 2007-03-06
Prefix: ca
Comments: Variety spoken in the "Comunidad Valenciana" region of Spain,
  where it is co-official with Spanish.

Type: variant
Subtag: baku1926
Description: Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet (Historical)
Added: 2007-04-18
Prefix: az
Prefix: ba
Prefix: crh
Prefix: kk
Prefix: krc
Prefix: ky
Prefix: sah
Prefix: tk
Prefix: tt
Prefix: uz
Comments: Latin orthography used in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
  for writing Turkic languages. Also called New Turkic Alphabet;
  Birlәşdirilmiş Jeni; Türk
  Әlifbasь; or Jaŋalif.

Do you really think these two entries are inadequate to describe their 
respective language variants?  I can't think of anything that came out 
of the debates over these subtags that would have improved these entries 
by their inclusion.

In fact, much of the mailing-list discussion of "valencia" had to do 
with including Description fields in multiple languages, and much of the 
discussion of "baku1926" had to do with the exact subtag value that was 
to be chosen.  There was very little disagreement over the meaning of 
either subtag, especially in the case of "valencia", where the 
references included with the registration form were not dictionaries or 
grammars, but merely citations of the law that makes Valencian an 
official language in the indicated region.

--
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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