RE: [Ltru] John Cowan throws in the towel on extlangs

Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> Thu, 29 November 2007 21:48 UTC

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From: Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com>
To: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>, "ltru@ietf.org" <ltru@ietf.org>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:48:51 -0800
Subject: RE: [Ltru] John Cowan throws in the towel on extlangs
Thread-Topic: [Ltru] John Cowan throws in the towel on extlangs
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> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@ccil.org]

> IMO we should strongly consider adding a new informative (and mutable)
> "Fallback" header in the registry which will inform people about
> problematic cases like "cmn" and "arb" (Standard Arabic), instructing
> them which language subtag to fall back to in cases of match failure.
> These will have to be cherry-picked, like Suppress-Script, but Peter
> Constable has estimated that there are no more than 15 such cases
> actually in wide use.  For some macrolanguages, there is no dominant
> variety, and no special consideration is as yet required; if new
> dominant
> varieties come to exist in future, new Fallback headers can be added.
> RFC 4647bis can then be revised to explain how this header MAY be used
> to enhance matching.

I've taken a cut at analyzing macrolanguages in terms of two key factors: widespread exposure in ICT (based on support in OSes), and whether there is a dominant language. (Of course, "dominant" varies on a continuum.)

I ended up with 16 considered to have wide exposure. File is attached.


Peter
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