[Ltru] Re: Review of 4646bis-10, macrolanguages in section 4.1

[John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>]

Here's some more wording changes for 4.1, embedded in the change I
suggested before.

Scripsi:

>         It is always permitted, and sometimes useful, to tag an
>         encompassed language using the subtag for its macrolanguage.
>         However, the Macrolanguage field doesn't define what the
>         relationship is between the encompassed language and its
>         macrolanguage, nor does it define how languages encompassed by the
>         same macrolanguage are related to each other.  In some cases, In
>         some cases, one of the encompassed languages serves as a standard
>         form for the entire macrolanguage and is frequently identified
>         with it; in other cases there is no dominant language, and the
>         macrolanguage simply serves as a cover term for the entire group.

Remove one instance of "In some cases,", obviously.  My bad.

>         Applications MAY use macrolanguage information to improve matching
>         or language negotiation.  For example, the information that 'sr'
>         (Serbian) and 'hr' (Croatian) share a macrolanguage expresses
>         a closer relation between those languages than between, say,
>         'sr' (Serbian) and 'ma' (Macedonian).  It is valid to use the
>         subtag of the encompassed language or of the macrolanguage to
>         form language tags.  However, many matching applications will
>         not be aware of the relationship between the languages.  Care in
>         selecting which subtags are used is crucial to interoperability.
> 
>         In general, use the most specific tag.  However, where the
>         macrolanguage tag has been historically used to denote a dominant
>         encompassed language, it SHOULD be used in place of the subtag
>         specific to that encompassed language unless it is necessary
>         to clearly distinguish the macrolanguage as a whole from the
>         dominant language variety.

Add:

        Macrolanguages and encompassed languages affected by this issue
        include:

        Arabic 'ar'                     Standard Arabic 'arb'
        Konkani (macrolanguage) 'kok'   Konkani (individual language) 'knn'
        Malay (macrolanguage) 'ms'      Malay (individual language) 'mly'
        Swahili (macrolanguage) 'sw'    Swahili (individual language) 'swh'
        Uzbek 'uz'                      Northern Uzbek 'uzn'
        Chinese 'zh'                    Mandarin Chinese 'cmn'

> 
>       In particular, the Chinese family of languages call for special
>       consideration.  Because the written form is very similar for most
>       languages having 'zh' as a macrolanguage (and because historically
>       subtags for the various encompassed languages were not available),
>       languages such as 'yue' (Cantonese) have historically used
>       either 'zh' or a tag (now grandfathered) beginning with 'zh'.
>       This means that macrolanguage information can be usefully
>       applied when searching for content or when providing fallbacks
>       in language negotiation.  For example, the information that 'yue'
>       has a macrolangauge of 'zh' could be used in the Lookup algorithm
>       to fallback from a request for "yue-Hans-CN" to "zh-Hans-CN"
>       without losing the script and region information (even though
>       the user did not specify "zh-Hans-CN" in their request).

-- 
There are three kinds of people in the world:   John Cowan
those who can count,                            cowan at ccil.org
and those who can't.


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