BCP47 Appeals process

[Lang Gérard]

Dear Doug Ewell,

For me, you are obliged when you have no choice.
So, if you admit that there has been a "standardization" by ASCII in the net (maybe this is no more the case, but it was and it gave bad habits to many people), then you have no choice but to see what you want to write in "real french orthograph" has been (and is sometimes always) "translated" with a suppression of almost all diacritics that produces a "new internet french orthograph" .  
So there is strictly no hack, but only a raw observation, that we have a "new internet french orthograph" that is more and more used in fact, specially by children,  because it is  more easy not to have to remember with the use of all these diacritics that make the charm (and also the cultural touch) of this language. 
On the other end, I am certainly not a fan of the use of "orthographic variants" for tagging  langages as I wrote in the first message we exchanged.  

In this message (20/08/2008), when analyzing the categories of entries inside IANA's Registry, I wrote:

     "1.4: Type "variant" has 24 entries corresponding to:
-1 very fondamental entry "fonipa" representing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), that allows to represent all phonems of all spoken languages in the world, and so to "write" all spoken languages;
-23 others meli-melo entries".

So, I am very clearly not in favor of adding much more meli-melo entries inside Type "variant".
But, if  we begin to do so more systematically, then I think that such variants have to be seriously considered.

Cordialement.
Gérard LANG

-----Message d'origine-----
De : ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] De la part de Doug Ewell
Envoyé : vendredi 19 septembre 2008 06:59
À : ietf-languages at iana.org
Objet : Re: BCP47 Appeals process

Lang Gérard <gerard dot lang at insee dot fr> wrote:

> How would you tag the obliged orthography for french inside the net, 
> that suppress almost every diacritics and is perhaps the today most 
> important form of written "french", FR-internet ?

The word "obliged" surprises me; I would not have guessed that anyone was actually *required* to type French without accents.

If this is a well-recognized orthographic variation, genuinely considered a "different way" of writing French, or if there is a requirement to process it differently in some way, then it's not entirely impossible that "French without diacritics" could be considered for a variant subtag.  Probably the same could be said for other languages, especially those that normally require a large number of diacritical marks.  After all, polytonic and monotonic Greek have their own variants.

However, if this is just a typing convenience, or a hack to get around character encoding problems or historically poor support in e-mail for non-ASCII letters, then there is no justfication IMHO for a variant subtag.  The same would be true for other such hacks, like the use of the apostrophe in Italian to replace acute accents.

The name 'internet' would almost certainly be inappropriate for such a variant; it alludes to too many other concepts associated with the Internet, such as Internet slang and abbreviations like LOL and TTYL and IMHO, or technical jargon.  A better solution (as is often the case) might be to pick a name that is more descriptive of the variation, such as 'ascii' or 'noaccent'.

If you do decide to go this route, please remember to use the registration form from RFC 4646, and be prepared for a debate.  As you've seen lately, we leave no stone unturned.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ^

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