Pinyin

[Phillips, Addison]

The guiding principle in forming language tags is to "tag content wisely." Wisdom, of course takes different forms, but 'km', 'es', and 'pqm' are almost certainly better tag choices than ones that include dubious region subtags if one is not familiar enough to know if a regional distinction applies (or not). A librarian (or anyone else) is better off following RFC 4646 and/or its successor, where it says:

--
Subtags SHOULD only be used where they add useful distinguishing information; extraneous subtags interfere with the meaning, understanding, and processing of language tags.
--

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of David Starner
> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 12:26 PM
> To: John Cowan
> Cc: ietf-languages at iana.org
> Subject: Re: Pinyin
> 
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 3:05 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> > David Starner scripsit:
> >
> >> km-US and tr-DE make sense; even if bo-TW doesn't exist today,
> it
> >> doesn't seem that unlikely a combination to appear in the future.
> >
> > Not really.  km-US may make sense as a *locale*, but as a
> *language
> > tag* it would mean "Khmer as spoken/written in the U.S.", which
> as far
> > as I know is not significantly different from Khmer as
> spoken/written
> > in Cambodia.
> 
> But whether or not that distinction is important may not be
> something
> the tagger knows; a librarian tagging recordings is probably better
> off tagging km-US, es-US and pqm-US for recordings of those
> language
> as spoken by Americans in the US then fussing over the fine details
> of
> dialectal variation in those languages.
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