Valencian registration redundant tags; prefixes; more information

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> It specifies that a regional subtag must be either:
>
>   region        = 2ALPHA                 ; ISO 3166 code
>                 / 3DIGIT                 ; UN M.49 code
>>
> VC would be a 2-character code,
> but the complex tag ES-V would not really consist of either 2 alpha 
> characters or 3 digits,
> as it is formed from two tags, and might not be allowed:

1.  No subtag can contain a hyphen.
2.  No subtag can be 1 letter long.
3.  Two-letter subtags can only be based on code elements in ISO 639-1 
or ISO 3166-1.

> In any case neither VC nor ES-V may belong to an acceptable standard 
> according to John (I do not know enough about this to say more because 
> I am still learning, but . . . VC is not one of the regions listed 
> with the registry!

Yes it is:

Type: region
Subtag: VC
Description: Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Added: 2005-10-16

> I'm still trying to make sense of RFC 4646; sorry!).

I know it's a long and heavyweight document, but I've tried to explain 
this particular facet before.  Let's try again.

Region subtags, per se, can ONLY come from two sources:

1.  2-letter code elements *officially assigned* in ISO 3166-1
2.  3-digit code elements in UN M.49

Code elements that were assigned in ISO 3166-1 at any time since 1988 
are eligible to be subtags.  Not all code elements from UN M.49 are 
eligible, including those that duplicate ISO 3166-1 codes and those that 
represent non-geographic collections.  RFC 4645 (which is much shorter 
than 4646) explains this in more detail.

Region subtags can NOT come from any other source.  They cannot come 
from ISO 3166-2 even though there are many 2-letter code elements in 
that standard.  They cannot be proposed by individuals, debated on the 
list, approved by the Reviewer, etc. UNLESS they come from ISO 3166-1 or 
UN M.49.  That is pretty much all there is to it.

A language as used in "region X," where "region X" cannot be adequately 
represented by a region subtag defined as above, can be covered by 
proposing a variant subtag for region X.  That is what Gabriel Babiano 
has done for Valencian and it seems likely that the subtag "valencia" 
will be approved.  It could not be approved as a region subtag because 
neither ISO 3166-1 nor UN M.49 has a code element for either Valencia 
proper or Comunidad Valenciana.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
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