Language subtag registration for acor1990 (ammended from ao1990)

António H F P A Emiliano (FCSH/UNL) ah.emiliano at fcsh.unl.pt
Thu Aug 25 16:48:54 CEST 2011


On Aug 25, 2011, at 15:10, Philip Newton wrote:

> 2011/8/25 "António H F P A Emiliano (FCSH/UNL)"  
> <ah.emiliano at fcsh.unl.pt>:
>> i) can anyone please provide me with precedents and similes?
>
> You may wish to have a look at
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry and search
> for "Type: variant" (very near the end of the file). That will find a
> number of variant subtags, some of which historical language forms or
> orthographies. For example, the first couple of variant subtags start
> with numbers denoting a year; a bit later, there is "baku1926" which
> also contains a year, and "luna1918" / "petr1708" even later.

Yes, those are helpful.

>> ii) were similar subtags created recently for reformed Dutch and  
>> German?
>
> For German, yes: the subtag "1996" refers to "German orthography of
> 1996". The pre-1996 orthography has the subtag "1901", with a current
> description of "Traditional German orthography".

I think this is the most simple (and less problematic) procedure .

pre1911 - Traditional Portuguese orthography (late 18th century to  
early 20th century)
1911 - Portuguese orthography of 1911
1945 - Portuguese orthography of 1945 (Convenção Ortográfica Luso- 
Brasileira, 1945)
1990 - Portuguese orthography of 1990 (Acordo Ortográfico da Língua  
Portuguesa, 1990) -->
--> alternatives: 1991 (ratification), 2008 (transitional  
enforcement), 2014 (full enforcement?)

The meaning for the dates must be clarified.
Earlier periods should be considered: pre1214, 1214, 1255, 1536, 15th  
century,  ...
Regional variants should also be encoded in subtags: at least one for  
each the signatories of the Treaty of 1990.
Differences between Portuguese and Brazilian are huge (they're  
different languages functionally and for all linguistic purposes no  
matter how they are written).

> I don't know whether there is a subtag for a Dutch spelling reform.

No tags for NL in that registry.
Their *absence* should be *food for thought* in this instance.

Does one really need language subtags which refer to spelling reforms?
We got along pretty well in PT without <1911> and <1945> subtags.
I mean 1911 was a major reform that changed drammatically the outlook  
of the written Portuguese language in Portugal (typographico >  
tipográfico, grammatica > gramática, archetypo > arquétipo, millennio  
 > milénio). No need for it was felt in past 100 yrs...
Shouldn’t one wait till the 1990-reform is fully enforced in Portugal  
and the remaining countries to add the subtag?

>> iii) can anyone please direct me to a document that states the formal
>> requirements of a language subtag of this kind?
>
> RFC 5646, available (for example) at
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646 , is probably the best place to
> look.

Ok. Many thanks. Your mail was very helpful. Regards. - A.


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