Hi -
As a technical contributor:
> From: "Nicholas Shanks" <contact at nickshanks.com>
> To: <ltru at ietf.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2008 9:43 AM
> Subject: [Ltru] Re: Progressing beyond borders-making subtags inclusive
...
> You now have me thoroughly befuddled. How can Northicia be pronounced
> with anything other than four syllables? I would have thought you'd
> use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londonistan
In my accent the sequence -icia is normally pronounced the same as the
sequence -isha. Two syllables. I had to think about the "four syllables"
a bit, and still am unsure whether the "c" would be an "s" or "sh" or
possibly "ch" or "ts".
> > Not so fast. You have to follow the RFC 4646 procedures, and do it
> > back
> > on ietf-languages.
>
> So that one is just for proposals and ensuing stick-beating, and this
> one is for general chit-chat?
ietf-languages at iana.org is for specific registration requests.
Talk about what the procedures or syntax should be (not "general
chit-chat") belongs on ltru at ietf.org
....
> > The difficulty is to know where to stop.
>
> I suggested just having those dialects that have names in the general
> lexicon of speakers of the host language. Specific needs can continue
> to be catered for by individual requests.
A couple of obstacles exist to using this kind of approach:
(1) there are *lots* of languages out there, and the folks on
ietf-languages at ietf.org probably do not have that level of
expertise in most of them, and must thus rely on others to
determine whether there is a need to tag a particular distinction.
(2) the names and distinctions observed in the general lexicon of
the speakers of a host language are at best only a starting point.
For example, my brother and sister have clearly different accents.
An untrained native speaker from the region might say "South
Dakota cowboy" and "rural Minnesota". A dialectologist would
use different terms, and for some purposes might choose to lump
them together (as does the Wikipedia article you cited), since
there are some common features, even though anyone from the
region will tell they're different.
(3) How does one decide that one has gathered an adequate set for
a particular language? It could easily be misunderstood as
"endorsing" or "recognizing" a particular set of dialects, potentially
politicizing work.
> > Unfortunately, counterexamples like Northern Cities make that
> > impossible --
> > it unquestionably exists, but most people haven't heard of it.
>
> People don't have to see the actual tag, or know what it's called.
> They could simply pick "New England (Wash./NYC/Boston)" from a list,
> and the software would put in the right tag, if that's the level of
> granularity available.
The philosophy has been to not try to second-guess the level of granularity
needed. For example, I'd be quite amazed to find Washington lumped
in with the accents of New England. There are historically several different
accents associated with Boston, and one can still hear them in use. My
expectation as a user of a tool that was able to distinguish Washington
and New York City forms of speech would be that it would distinguish the
various accents of Boston, since the differences are at least as great.
But the point is that we don't have the resources to do this,
in advance of any stated need, for all the dialects of all the languages in the
registry.
...
> It is the one I care most about, however. The other being how my OS
> uses them to do various stuff. For example, if I set my locale to
> en_DE so that I get the Euro currency symbol by default, and the right
> Summer/Winter Time dates, VLC comes up in German (i.e. that particular
> software ignores the language code and changes it's language based on
> the country code!). I already mentioned it's use by the TTS system.
Let's not confuse locales with language tags, despite the fact that some
strings are would be well-formed in either role.
....
> > True, which means it waits until some volunteer armed with sufficient
> > knowledge, documentation, and dedication steps forward (whether the
> > volunteer is paid by someone else to do it is not a consideration in
> > the IETF). Fortunately, even a little accurate tagging goes a long
> > way.
>
> I guess that means me, right?
> Okay, so here's a list of 'named' British accents that I can think of.
> Please add/remove from this list and when it reaches stability I will
> try and find some documentation for each one so it can get added. I
> tried to go one level down from en-GB and en-IE without getting too
> picky.
As co-chair:
Now, registration requests for specific subtags belong on ietf-languages at iana.org
General principles here, specific cases there.
I'm inclined to tolerate discussion of such a list ere only to the extent that
it helps the WG decide whether it would make sense to change the
existing modus operandi with respect to subtags for dialects.
Randy
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