Subject: [Ietf-languages] Recommendation not to register variant subtags of the form 0nnn

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2020 22:43:54 -0400

While BCP 47 does not forbid 4-digit variant subtags that begin with 0, I
am hereby suggesting to the Tyrant and his Good Right Arm that such tags
never be registered.  It would be very easy to confuse '0029' with '029'
(Caribbean).

What say you all?

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        [email-masked]
A poetical purist named Cowan                   [that's me]
Once put the rest of us dowan.                  [on xml-dev]
"Your verse would be sweeter / If it only had metre
And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan."     [overpacked line!]
--Michael Kay

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From: Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 14:08:18 +0900

> never be registered.  It would be very easy to confuse '0029' with '029'

Sounds good. Has such a case actually come up?

Regards,   Martin.

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 11:09:24 -0400

I don't think so.  But I want to avoid in such contexts as spreadsheets the
"U.S. postal code problem", whereby the code 07104 becomes 7104 because
Excel thinks it's a number rather than a string of digits.

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From: Phake Nick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 04:45:58 +0800

I thought the number of digit is already a big enough difference like you
won't confuse zh-cmn and zh-cn.

But another bigger question is, how about BC years? Since it's obviously
not compatible with BCP 47 to add a negative sign in front of the digits,
which would render as equivalent to another hyphen

在 2020年7月29日週三 10:44，John Cowan <[email-masked]> 寫道：

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 16:54:56 -0400

It isn't about the number of characters: it's about the fact that '021'
feels like a number and we are not used to distinguishing between 21, 021,
and 0021.  By the same token, it would be bad to encode both 12345 and
012345 as variant subtags (and still worse to register 00001 and
00000001).  This is specific to leading zeros: obviously `aaaaaaa` and
`aaaaaaaa` would also be bad, but for a different reason.

If we need a BCE date, then the subtag format 'bcennnn' works for me.  The
tag "egy-bce32c" for early Egyptian hieroglyphic writing also makes sense,
since we cannot usually pin such things down to a particular year.

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 15:05:33 -0600

Phake Nick wrote:

 �

> But another bigger question is, how about BC years? Since it's

> obviously not compatible with BCP 47 to add a negative sign in front

> of the digits, which would render as equivalent to another hyphen

 �

I’m not sure why that wouldn’t just be ‘####bc” or ‘####bce”.

 �

The variants involving years that have been proposed, registered, and/or imported from RFC 3066 have all been from comparatively recent history (i.e. since the 17th century). I would think the farther back you go, the harder it would be (though of course not impossible) to nail down a language variation to a specific year, even citing a well-known published work. Subtags representing years before the 11th century CE might be somewhat hypothetical.

 �

--

Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

 �

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From: Richard Wordingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 11:14:17 +0100

On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 15:05:33 -0600
"Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Subtags representing years before the 11th
> century CE might be somewhat hypothetical.

Perhaps this is just a dream, but in principle they could be useful for
selecting a 'Mesopotamian' cuneiform font.  The style used in the
Unicode code charts is unusable for matching to neo-Assyrian cuneiform. 

In practice, we'd probably use non-numeric subtags.

Richard.

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 09:01:21 -0600

Richard Wordingham wrote:

>> Subtags representing years before the 11th century CE might be 
>> somewhat hypothetical.
>
> Perhaps this is just a dream, but in principle they could be useful
> for selecting a 'Mesopotamian' cuneiform font.  The style used in the

Could that distinction really be pinned down to a single year in antiquity, though?

> In practice, we'd probably use non-numeric subtags.

Yes, or perhaps partial-numeric subtags that reference a century.