Current requests (was: Re: Third correction to 'ao1990' : Prefix field - addition of 'gl')

[Peter Constable]

Michael's conclusion may actually valid, though I don't know that I agree with his reasoning.

If a user needs to tag some document as gl-ao1990, there is nothing whatsoever that prevents them from doing that now, without the change Luc has requested, and that tag would be fully valid. All that is lacking by non-addition of the prefix tag is drawing attention to gl-*-ao1990 as a use case that's significant enough to have been called out in the registry.

Now, Michael says, "... users haven't shown a need, and ... there's nothing so far official about this practice..." There are a couple of fallacies here. First, nothing _needs_ to be official to provide sufficient justification for adding a prefix tag. Secondly, the existing of even one online publication using this orthography (provided it is, in fact, using this orthography) is a self-evident demonstration that there _is an existing need_.

But there can still be a gap between the minimum demonstration for a tag combining gl with ao1990 and whatever is the minimum case needed to warrant declaration of gl as a prefix for ao1990 in the registry. Our problem is that we don't have any clearly stated minimal criteria for this.

Having said that, my perspective is that if there is some identifiable user community for gl-ao1990, then I think that's a sufficient condition for listing gl as a prefix for ao1990.



Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Ietf-languages [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Michael Everson
Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2015 5:36 PM
To: ietflang IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: Current requests (was: Re: Third correction to 'ao1990' : Prefix field - addition of 'gl')

On 20 May 2015, at 01:22, David Starner <prosfilaes at gmail.com> wrote:


> What does official orthography have to do with anything? We went from ISO 639-2 to ISO 639-3 despite the fact that what, maybe a dozen of those hundreds of new languages are official anywhere? That one newspaper has probably exceeded the entire volume of works printed in most of those new languages, and several of the scripts in ISO 15924. The standard here seems quite high.

I am not convinced that the practice of one online publication, particularly in the absence of any information about this in other Galician sources, is sufficient grounds in this case. Is Luc asking for this because he actually needs to tag this data? On the 26th of March he pointed out that they “would need” but “don’t” tag their data. I don’t think that’s enough.

Since the users haven’t shown a need, and since there’s nothing so far official about this practice, I don’t see a good case for adding Galician to this record at this time. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

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