Criteria for languages?

[Mark Davis ☕]

What are your criteria for "whether Walliserdeutsch can be
*correctly* tagged as "gsw", or whether whether
Latgalian can *correctly* be tagged as "lav". You didn't particularly like
the "reasonable person" approach, although that is in widespread use in
legal matters for typical types of judgments.

A strict approach would be that if Latgalian is indeed a different language
from (mutually incomprehensible with) Latvian, then it was incorrect to tag
any Latgalian with "lav", and we just encode a new language and move on.
Same for Walliserdeutsch.

Mark


On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 12:00, Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>wrote:

> Hi -
>
> > From: "Mark Davis ☕" <mark at macchiato.com>
> > To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>
> > Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 11:22 AM
> > Subject: Re: Criteria for languages?
> >
> > It is the lack of a uniform policy that bothers me more than the
> particular
> > case. Anything that is Walliserdeutsch right now would be either tagged
> "de"
> > (because that was all that was available until gsw was encoded) or "gsw".
> > Let's take precisely your wording and apply it to that case.
> >
> > If an application requires standard *Swiss German* and *Walliserdeutsch*
> to
> > be treated as distinct
> > languages, then clearly it would need to use the new subtag to identify
> > standard
> > Swiss German, since "gsw" would mean "any kind of *Swiss German*,
> including
> > *Walliserdeutsch*".   This
> > is a natural consequence of our "no narrowing" rules - all of the data
> which
> > is
> > currently precisely and accurately tagged as *Swiss German* would remain
> > accurately
> > tagged, though most would no longer be precisely tagged.  (Data for which
> > the
> > tagger was unable to make a determination whether it was *Swiss German*
> or *
> > Walliserdeutsch*
> > would remain precisely tagged.)  The assumption is that it is better to
> > introduce
> > a (potentially lingering) imprecision in the tagging of legacy data,
> rather
> > than to
> > cause any once-accurate tags on legacy data to become incorrect.
> >
> > If your reasoning is correct for Latvian, then it is also correct for
> Swiss
> > German! If it is not correct for Swiss German, then it is not correct for
> > Latvian.
>
> It's not "my" reasoning.  It's a consequence of sticking to the rules
> established
> in ltru.  However, there are crucial questions underlying both cases, for
> which
> the respective answers may differ. The first group of questions is whether
> Latgalian can *correctly* be tagged as "lav", whether Walliserdeutsch can
> *correctly* be tagged as "de", and whether Walliserdeutsch can be
> *correctly*
> tagged as "gsw".  The second group of questions is whether there is
> anything
> approaching a "standard" "lav", "de", or "gsw".  In the last case, I'm
> pretty
> sure the answer is "no such animal".
>
> Randy
>
>
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