Addition request: alsatian

[Markus Scherer]

On Jan 3, 2008 1:30 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:
> 1) A general wariness against region codes, which are not in general
> good discriminants for languages. Here, the political border does not

But those are used widely, where the region code makes an appropriate
distinction: en-US, pt-BR, ar-SA, etc.

> completely coincide with the linguistic border. See for instance the
> map in http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Alemannisch.png

This map seems to suggest that Alsatian could (should?) be called
"Oberrhiinalemannisch" to include the same language(?) across the
border in DE. And that does not look to be represented well by -FR.

> 2) A search problem: there is no easy way in the registry to find a
> tag for alsatian. You cannot stick a Description to a tag, only to a
> subtag (except for grandfathered tags). I do not think that "taggers"
> will think of gsw-FR for alsatian.

The Unicode Consortium encountered the same sort of problem for
"encode this 'character' as that sequence of Unicode code points". A
partial solution was to register names for some of those recommended
sequences. Adding registration for select language tags, not just
subtags, might help here as well.

markus