Scottish English (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM)

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Thu Aug 23 19:31:15 CEST 2007


Hi -

> From: "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>
> To: "IETF Languages Discussion" <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 12:45 AM
> Subject: Re: Scottish English (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM)
>
> At 18:43 -0700 2007-08-21, Karen_Broome at spe.sony.com wrote:
> 
> >English is a language and Scotland is a well-defined region. There 
> >is no controversy about these two statements -- why is there so much 
> >controversy over putting the two together? Isn't this what the 
> >variant tag is for?
> 
> Because one wants to ensure that the variant tag delimits something 
> specific.

"Specific" is in the eye of the tagger, based on what distinctions need
to be idenfitied.

> Glasgow and Edinburgh speech varieties are rather different.

While tagging that distinction may be useful for some purpose, it's far
too fine-grained for others.  If someone someday needs to register tags
for Glasgow or for obscure Slovenian dialects, fine.  Though I think English
as spoken in Fargo is "rather different" from English as spoken in Minneapolis, it
would be insane to preclude registration of a variant that included both, since
for many purposes there is no value in making that distinction.

Randy.



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