registration requests re Portuguese

[David Starner]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Yury <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/13/2015 03:38 AM, David Starner wrote:
>>
>> For en-US and en-UK, nds-DE and nds-NL, and at least up to now, pt-BR
>> and pt-PT, the language+region combination has served to distinguish
>> dialects that many users felt needed distinguishing.
>
> All those ones you mention surely did their part in the days when all was
> needed was a coarse-ishly delimited set of basic _culture_-related tags
> (like, currency, thousands, and date format). In days where the more and
> more fine distinctions are being set up in the _language_ area (and more and
> more folks sort of get their share of ramplight from those), not quite so.

None of the ones I mentioned were about culture; they were all the
source of separate Wikipedias or translation efforts. You want to
offer more fine distinctions, that's fine, but:

nds-DE and nds-NL is an accepted split. A different split of Low
German dialects may be more linguistically correct, but could actually
hurt current localization projects if the split is more contentious,
and certainly will if it's more fine-grained.

Do whatever you want for English dialects, but I and most of my fellow
Americans don't want to be bothered beyond choosing American English.
(The concern is marginally higher for audio, but even then, most audio
systems for American audiences offer a choice of male or female, not
New England or Texas.)

> So you have fuzzily defined categories, like those you mention, generalising
> the localised practice, for which and for which only lang_REGION are of use,
> and you have precisely defined categories, which do not need REGION, and
> which are trans-border, indeed.

Speaking for me and most of my fellow Americans, I want my systems to
use American English, and I want to have that option. Any other way of
expressing the same option is going to annoy me and seriously confuse,
if not me, my less-linguistically competent peers. I can't imagine
what precisely defined dialects of English would win you that would be
worth the support calls or mailing list rage from people who can't
figure how to set their software to get American English.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.