Language subtag modification form for 1694acad (Was: Flavors of Hepburn)

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> If the language subtag registry gets too cumbersome and you need to 
> index it and want help, let me know.

I don't think the Registry is "cumbersome" in the sense that it is 
harder to work with than it should be.  It's a large file, but there are 
a lot of languages and scripts and countries in the world.

>> It's entirely possible that the dates coincide, but that doesn't mean 
>> the histories are related, which was my point.
>
> ???
>
> Basically "Early Modern" here means after the Middle Ages, and before 
> the nineteenth (and maybe the eighteenth) century, whether we are 
> talking about language, literature, national history.  That's my 
> interpretation of the term.

That's fine, but if one is looking for precise dates to identify that 
such-and-so language variation was in use from this date to that date, 
it doesn't accomplish anything to note that such-and-so period in a 
country's history occurred from this date to that date.  The concepts 
are just not that closely related, and as your research has shown, Early 
Modern French in particular simply does not "end" at a particular point 
in time.  I think we agree in principle on this point, and I don't wish 
to belabor it further.

> I could not find the URL for it at your site.  Sorry, I tried to link 
> to it but it was not there.

As I said later, it's not publicly available due to some issues that 
have caused me to be dissatisfied with it.  I could send it to you 
off-list, but I don't want the issues to turn into a support burden; I'd 
rather get it right next time.

> Some day it might be nice to just get the registry indexed so that it 
> can be accessed just a part at a time (2-char language codes, 3-char 
> language codes, script codes, country codes, variant codes, 
> grandfathered subtags . . .)
> (But it would have to be an HTML or an XHTML and not simply a simple 
> text index . . . )
> If you want help with this . . .  at any time.

The IANA Language Subtag Registry is a data source.  To the extent it is 
incorporated into software, it is up to each developer or team to make 
the Registry and their code work together, including indexing the 
Registry data as needed.  Indexing of this sort is an 
application-dependent concept.

I don't think I expressed that the job was somehow beyond me or too big 
for me.  I built both the initial RFC 4646 Registry and the initial RFC 
5646 Registry (both before the incremental changes discussed on this 
list) and wrote several programs to help index and otherwise manage the 
data during the Internet-Draft stages of these two documents.

--
Doug Ewell  |  Thornton, Colorado, USA  |  http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14  |  ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s ­