Missing subtags 003 and 172

[Doug Ewell]

Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at telia dot com> wrote:

> As far as I can tell, Mark is right here. Note that the 172 code was not
> created purely for statistical purposes,
> but is an actual region (even if somewhat unstable). This is distinct from
> the codes 199, 432, 722, 778.

But it's categorized with the "Small island developing States" class of
code elements.  As soon as we start trying to divine the UNSD's intent
here instead of reading their categories, the gates are wide open.

> This is a purely corrective action w.r.t. the rules in the RFC, and the
> question of whether these
> codes are useful for language tagging is at this point irrelevant. For that
> matter, one may wonder
> how the code 001 (World) is useful in language tagging...

Mark articulated a good use case for 001 back when we first starting
talking about M.49.  "fr-001" explicitly means "French as used anywhere
in the world," that is, internationally acceptable French, as opposed to
simply "fr" which leaves it unspecified whether the French thus tagged
is acceptable in, say, Canada.

This is also the justification for the pending "classical Sanskrit"
variant; it makes the "classical" qualifier explicit instead of
implicit, in those (perhaps rare) cases where that is important.

By contrast, what does "language X as used in the CIS" tell anyone, for
any language X, in any geographical or other context, that either a more
specific tag like "xx-KZ" or a less specific tag like "xx" would not
already cover?  That is my second complaint against 172, the first being
that UNSD categorizes it as an economic grouping.

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