Questions on ISO 639-3

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> I should have chosen a different example; sorry; the point I really 
> wanted to make is that some fine distinctions are made in German and 
> English dialects; for example:
>
> Type: grandfathered
> Tag: en-GB-oed
> Description: English, Oxford English Dictionary spelling
> Added: 2003-07-09
>
> Type: redundant
> Tag: de-DE-1901
> Description: German, German variant, traditional orthography
> Added: 2001-07-17
> %%
>
> Type: redundant
> Tag: de-DE-1996
> Description: German, German variant, orthography of 1996
> Added: 2001-07-17
>
> If someone wanted to distinguish Moldavian as spoken in Moldavia from 
> Moldavian as spoken in Romania, the best way would be to get a 
> variant,

NO.

Here, once again, is the difference:

"Oxford English Dictionary" does not have an ISO 3166-1 or UN M.49 
country code, or an ISO 15924 script code.  Consequently, there are no 
available region or script subtags to denote this language variety. 
Because of this, a tag was registered in 2003 to denote this language 
variety, using what we would today call a variant subtag, although it 
would have to conform to RFC 4646 structural requirements for variant 
subtags, which 'oed' does not (which is why the tag is grandfathered).

"1901" does not have an ISO 3166-1 or UN M.49 country code, or an ISO 
15924 script code.  Consequently, there are no available region or 
script subtags to denote this language variety.  Because of this, tags 
were registered in 2001 to denote this language variety, using what we 
would today call a variant subtag; and in fact an actual variant subtag 
'1901' was registered in 2005 to serve essentially the same purpose 
(which is why the original tags are redundant).

Everything about "1901" in the previous paragraph applies to "1996" as 
well.

On the other hand...

"Moldova" and "Romania" DO have ISO 3166-1 country codes.  Consequently, 
there ARE available region subtags to denote these language varieties. 
Because of this, there is NO need to register variant subtags, since the 
problem at hand already has a solution, established long before RFC 4646 
and even before RFC 1766, and understood by countless existing 
language-tag processors, including legacy processors which don't know 
anything about variant subtags or even script subtags.

This is how it is.  There will be no variant subtag for "Moldavian." 
Full stop.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
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