Review period; Nepali and Oriya

[Doug Ewell]

Mark Davis 🍶 <mark at macchiato dot com> wrote:

> Now, that being said, if this group wants to have Nepali and Oriya
> be macro languages, it is not really a problem for CLDR; simply more
> entries in the tables. It will cause migration hassles for other
> implementations that use BCP47, but that is not an issue with CLDR.
> The more common the language, the worse the hassles. For example,
> consider what would happen were ISO to decide that 'en' really was a
> macrolanguage with 'ens' being Standard English, and 'enz' being New
> Zealand English—how much software would hiccough when it hit
> 'enz-GB'...

I don't think this is an argument for or against creating extlangs. It's
more an argument that ISO 639-3/RA should stop converting individual
language code elements into macrolanguages. This group didn't decide to
have Nepali and Oriya be macrolanguages, of course; that was the RA's
decision.

If the RA did what you posit with English, and ietf-languages followed
this by creating extlangs, then the theoretical "New Zealand English as
used in the United Kingdom" could be tagged, using extlang form, as
"en-enz-GB". Existing software might have an easier time with this than
with "enz-GB". Of course, in order to assign extlangs under English,
this group would have to buy the notion that there is a "specific
dominant variety" of English (§4.1.2), and that seems improbable.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­