Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at comhem dot se> wrote:
The spelling should of course be fixed in the source standard, in this case preferably before 639-3 is published so that we don't get these ASCII fallbacks in the language subtag registry (not even initially).
If you can get the JAC to do this before release, then of course the "fixed" spellings will appear in the Registry. This is really the only way the "use the right characters" crowd and the "follow the standard exactly" crowd are going to see eye to eye -- by getting the standard to use the "right" characters.
No, they do not look like the ASCII fallbacks used at all, except for EXCLAMATION MARK vs. LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK.
That's true for the click letters. When we fought the Apostrophe Wars, the ironic part was that that the "correct" characters looked essentially the same as the ASCII fallbacks, but *only if* they were available in the font. This was generally true for U+2019, but not at all true for U+02BB; many fonts show a box there.
Another comment I have is that country names should not be used for disambiguation of same-named but different languages. Country names are not quite as stable as one would want for the langauge names. Rather one should use language group names (at a suitable level). Nor is it always clear from the country names if one refers to closely related languages, or to languages that are not at all related (though one can sometimes guess).
I'll let Peter address the questions of whether this would even be feasible, and whether it would improve anything.
The following language code descriptions (language names) should be spelled with the proper letters, not using ASCII fallbacks. The fallback to proper letter mapping appears to be as follows:/ -> ǀ 01C0;LATIN LETTER DENTAL CLICK;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN LETTER PIPE;;;; // -> ǁ 01C1;LATIN LETTER LATERAL CLICK;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN LETTER DOUBLE PIPE;;;; =/ -> ǂ 01C2;LATIN LETTER ALVEOLAR CLICK;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN LETTER PIPE DOUBLE BAR;;;; ! -> ǃ 01C3;LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;LATIN LETTER EXCLAMATION MARK;;;;' -> ʼ 02BC;MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE;Lm;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
My guess is that you are going to have a tough time getting the JAC to adopt characters in language names that (a) are in few to no 8-bit legacy character sets and (b) have experienced such poor uptake in modern fonts.
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