Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] First cut at a BCP 47 extension structure for ISO TR 21636

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 19:19:48 -0700

Sebastian Drude wrote:
 
> Looking at the latest version of the document, there are indeed a
> number of such 'modifying' statements.
> [...]
> I guess that this can all be easily solved by adding further two-
> letter keys to provide these indications in their values as if they
> were additional dimensions.  The rules then would have to state that
> they are only allowed if the major dimension is present.
 
This will require some care. It would not be good to have two-letter
keys for modifying attributes that syntactically look just like the
two-letter keys for dimensions, but are at least partially dependent on
them. IMHO it is best to minimize reliance on the extension's registry
to perform syntactic (not just semantic) validation of tags.
 
>> https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tag-extensions-registry
>
> I see, only two, "t" and "u", are registered.  Plenty of room to
> register "g" and "v".
 
I'm not sold on the 'g' extension at present. Let's make that a separate
discussion. I'm reserving comments on the later passage about certain
communities not wanting to bother with the ISO 639-3 registration
process.
 
> This [Adhari] was just a fictious case, taking one of the first
> languages with a Glottocode that apparently does not have any ISO 639
> entry.  There are no real "reviewers" (reviewing what?).
 
ISO 639-3 has reviewers who examine requests on many levels, such as
determining whether a proposed language is already encoded, whether it
is a language in its own right versus a dialect or other variation of
another language, whether it is adequately documented, and so forth.
 
--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org