registration requests re Portuguese

[Luc Pardon]

On 10-04-15 17:51, Michael Everson wrote:

> I am satisfied with 
> 
> abl1943:  pt
> ao1990:   pt-BR, pt-CV, pt-PT
> 
> But despite saying they could live with the latter, some people offered more grumblings. For my part I was not convinced by them. 
> 

  Why are you not convinced?

  You raised some concerns and asked that they be addressed. That is
fair. So people "offered grumblings" and all you have to say is "I am
not convinced, period". Please elaborate.


  To re-iterate my "grumblings" :

  1. There is no evidence whatsoever that regional variants of ao1990 do
exist. There are only assumptions and guesses. This is not enough to
justify the narrowing of the original request down from "Prefix: pt".


  2. The AO1990 was designed by Portuguese-speaking linguists for use
all over the world.

  Following that logic, it must be "Prefix: pt".

  It wouldn't be a spelling reform if there weren't any opponents, but
it is not the business of this list to take sides. It is also not the
business of this list to try and track the progress of the reform.


  3. Narrowing to only the countries that ratified AO1990 is arbitrary
and makes no sense.

  It is arbitrary because this particular convention happens to be
implemented as an international agreement between multiple governments.
Most spelling conventions are not.

  It makes no sense because a spelling convention can be used without
being ratified, there is simply no connection between the two.


  4. Narrowing in the way we do it here is most illogical as well.

  * For ao1990, we narrow to three countries out of the nine where
Portuguese is an official language.

  * For oxendict, we are about to widen it from "en-GB" to "en" because
there is anecdotal evidence for "en-IE". But aren't there about sixty
countries where English is an official language?

  So two out of sixty and we widen it in case of English, three out of
nine and we narrow it in case of Portuguese. Where is the logic here?


  5. Actually, if the subtag must be narrowed to the countries that
ratified the AO1990, there should be seven prefixes, not three.

  According to the Portuguese Wikipedia article, the countries that
ratified the AO1990 are:

    Brazil / Cabo Verde / Guinea-Bissau / Mozambique / Portugal / São
Tomé and Príncipe / East Timor.

    That leaves only Angola and Macau, where the situation is not clear
to me.

    The Wikipedia article currently says that Angola requested a
three-year moratorium for ratification, "to expire in 2013", and that
Macau intends to adopt the AO1990 "by the end of 2012".

    We are 2015 now. Clearly we're looking at outdated information.

    We could of course find out what the current situation is, but
wouldn't it be easier to stick to plain "pt" instead?



   6. To summarize: please add one to the number of people that are of
the opinion that ao1990 should be registered with "Prefix: pt".


   Luc Pardon