BCP47 Appeals process

Yury Tarasievich yury.tarasievich at gmail.com
Thu Sep 18 07:24:29 CEST 2008


Peter Constable wrote:
> Having a tag with a very generic mnemonic value, "academy", but which is restricted to a very specific semantic will not be particularly convenient for global users. It would really help if the subtag somehow reflected more specifically the identity of the institution in question. Somehow, it shouldn't be hard to come up with a 5-8 alpha subtag more specifically indicative of "Institute of Linguistics of Academy of Sciences of Belarus" than is "academy". I still think something along the lines of "beacad" or "acadbe" or "acadscbe" (or any of several other possibilities) would be better.
>   
Or "abracadabra", possibly? I already asked for a clarification on this 
"requirement" for the subtags being self-explaining without the main 
tag. The furthest the replies got to was an allusion to a precedent law 
-- which doesn't answer my question, really.

As I see it, all this goes against plain common sense. The meaning of 
the word is partly in the context. What other academy could "1959acad" 
subtag mean, if coupled with the be- main tag? And what use is subtag 
without main tag? After all, when (if) some other, non-Belarusian 
academy standardises its own version of the Belarusian literary norm 
(I'll have yet to see it!), then the registry could deal with it by 
composing the subtag specifically suited to the situation (employing 
name emangling etc.). Until then, such complications are just not needed.

Anyway, if we are talking precedent, the French subtags are happily 
using "generic" "year-acad" subtags, as far as I know. I'll have yet to 
see good reason for Belarusian ones to not to.

-Yury



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