Region subtags and orthographic variants (was: Re: registration requests re Portuguese)

Yury yury.tarasievich at gmail.com
Thu Apr 16 13:25:41 CEST 2015


Doug, spoken like a gentleman. Thank you.

And yes, we are not in a Henry Higgins world here, and every model 
(language tag is, after all, a model of a real world phenomenon) 
necessary loses precision.

And I'm not moving for _wholesale_ throwing out the good old ll_RR 
model, as it still has its uses, and also, because informatics is such a 
traditionalist field.

Now, for your question (I'm not quoting anything else of your elaborate 
text -- for the sake of in-list legibility):

 > Does all of this make sense? Any of it?

All of the items 1-5 make sense, I have no quarrel with 1-3 and 5, and 
_my_ contention is only with the proposed practical solution outlined in 
pt.4.

The reason is: ll_RR- and -standard are, in a sense, mutually 
contradicting, _at least linguistically_. That is, those are usus 
(coarsely, real-world departing from ideal) and artifact (ruleset, book, 
paper). You can't particularise first from left to right, than right to 
left, that is confusing.
(And the thing grates on my nerves, too.)

On the other hand, I agree there might be a need to specify some 
generally specified departure from 'ideal' (standard). Why not do it 
properly (in the sense of building sense hierarchies):

ll-variant-RR, e.g., pt-ao1990-PT --

-- 1) language (the most general formalisation)
-- 2) state of the pt.1 formalisation
-- 3) real-world diff from pt.2

Now you have a (fairly) well readable (left to right) scheme, which 
captures all three phenomena and puts them into a proper perspective.

This way, you may particularise even further, in the form
ll-variant-RR-observation, which would refer to the specific set of 
observation data on the departure from standard.

Which is all in spirit of rfc5646, I believe. I'm only not sure of the 
four part scheme itself; I didn't study it. The respective ABNF spec 
_seems_ to allow it.

(Coming from East European background, I may have a perspective on this 
which many of this list English-world active participants do not share 
or fancy, even.)
So all of this might be against the lore, of course. Is it?

-Yury


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