Leif Halvard Silli <lhs at malform dot no> wrote:
I think Mark actally expressed that registering "2003" as a subtag with the meaning "language reform linked to year 2003" would satisfy the uniqueness requirement.Further down in this letter, you say that you disagree with him (and those of us who agree - at least I and Martin) in this.
My main objections are (1) to having two subtags of the same type with the same value, and (2) to using year numbers simply to make subtags unique, or to satisfy the length criterion, not because people would actually identify the variation with the year.
Mark seems to have addressed the first objection, although I'm still somewhat concerned that "Resian orthography invented in 1994" and "French Canadian spelling reform of 1994" don't really meet the criterion of "have the same meaning" in the sense that Unified Turkic does, with its 10 prefixes.
And what about e.g. "1996", would we be fiddling with what it was registereded as if we said that it from now on means "Language reforms of the following languages linked to year 1996: German, X, Y, Z"?
I don't think that would change the meaning of "de-1996". I do think it would be a bit like 'northern', in the sense that there may well be a Northern Foovian and a Northern Quuxian, but they have nothing in common except the name "Northern."
This is open to interpretation, and it is certainly not a showstopper for me the way two variants with the same value would have been. But it does seem like a subversion of what we tried to accomplish in RFC 4646, Section 3.5, fifth paragraph after Figure 5. (*)
Regarding what's likely, that's a matter of what one are used to. The more there is a pattern, the more one will get used to.
That's exactly what worries me. The more we open the box of giving a variant two different meanings, the harder it will be to keep that box shut.
German was a notable special case: it had a well-known, widely publicized, and much-debated orthographic revision for which we ended up creating the tag "de-1996" (with complement "de-1901" for the old orthography) back in the RFC 3066 whole-tag days...This socalled "well-known"-ness: All that is matter of how familiar you are with the particular language. I do not understand the likelyhood question. Language reforms is a common thing.
I don't mean "well-known" to me or the members of the ietf-languages list. I mean "well-known" to speakers of the language and the ultimate users of the subtag. If German speakers generally understand what is meant by "1996 German" as opposed to "1901 German," then the year modifiers are appropriate. Do users of Hanyu Pinyin generally understand the relevance of "1958" in identifying that romanization?
Here you bring up some relevant "hairs in the soup": Even if we establish that years are to mean "language reform", there will still be some subtags which do not fit nicely into the system, and also some subtags which aren't contstructed that way (as years) even though they (perhaps) could have been.
Well, sure. We already have subtags like that, '1606nict' and '1694acad', which are intended to represent snapshots in time, rather than reforms that took place in those years. They essentially mean "French as used around 1606" and "French as used around 1694." It would be equally appropriate to use "fr-1606nict" for French written a few years before 1606 or a few years after. This would not be true of "de-1996", since the reform didn't exist until 1996. So the model is already not perfect, not that we would expect it to be.
Regarding "tons": The fact of the matter is that coming up with - and agreeing to - language subtag *names* is an extra burdon for any registerer. It is an extra fence to protect against registration of variation subtags. (The region subtags are not decided by us, you know, but by the UN ... etc.)While OTOH, using year for language reforms, is very inviting. It could encourage registration. Should that be avoided?
This is like saying, "Should we encourage stimulation of the economy?" Well, of course we should, but HOW we go about doing it is critically important.
If the year is only present in the subtag value to make it unique or to satisfy the length criterion, if it is not actually *identified* with the language variation in people's minds, then it is not the best choice.
-- Doug Ewell * Thornton, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ (*) Discordians would appreciate all those 5's. _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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