French orthography on the Internet (Was: BCP47 Appeals process)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Sat Sep 20 04:12:54 CEST 2008


Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr>, his name spelled without 
the accent presumably to get around some e-mail deficiency, wrote:

>> I can't tell whether you feel it is a legitimate variation or not.
>
> I'm not 100 % sure of the meaning of "legitimate".
>
> If it means that I approve this orthography or not, well, this is 
> irrelevant: people speak and write languages as they want, regardless 
> of my opinion.
>
> If it means there is an actual use, well, there certainly is, but it 
> is typically only in the deepness of private discussions, so it is 
> hard to gauge its importance.

It means a variation that is distinct enough to justify its own subtag.

We have no iron-clad rules for what constitutes a taggable distinction, 
nor could we, but there are precedents that are more or less followed. 
We tag orthographic variants that are different enough to require their 
own spell-checker dictionaries.  We don't tag spoken accents, like 
Brooklyn English.  I can't tell which side of the fence Gérard feels 
"unaccented French" is on.

--
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  ˆ



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