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.
More information about the Ietf-languages
mailing list