Subject: [Ltru] Description on tags, not just subtags?

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 11:29:02 +0100

A registration request of a variant recently triggered a discussion on
wether we should be able to add Description fields to tags, not just
subtags (ignoring the specific issue of grandfathered tags).

For instance, if we use "alsatian" to refer to the variant of alemannic
spoken in Alsace (France), we cannot put a:

  Description: Alsatian 
  Description: Els&#xE4;ssisch

to the tag gsw-FR.

Is it a real problem? Should we address it? How?

Markus Scherer <[email-masked]> wrote:

The Unicode Consortium encountered the same sort of problem for
"encode this 'character' as that sequence of Unicode code points". A
partial solution was to register names for some of those recommended
sequences. Adding registration for select language tags, not just
subtags, might help here as well.

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2008 07:32:41 -0800

On the outside chance that this is not a sock puppet...

LB <lbleriot at gmail dot com> wrote:

> I am sorry, I do not understand.  What I mean is that if the same 
> language name is associated  to several langtags will not create any 
> problem.  The same as the same actual language can have several 
> language names and ISO entries ? What is the problem if one refers 
> French as "fr" or as "fra", or as "x-français" as long as the 
> allocutors agree ?

Coding systems exist so that senders and receivers can communicate in a 
clear, unequivocal way, without having to make any special arrangement 
other than to adhere to the published coding system.

Having multiple code elements for the same entity does not aid this: it 
requires receivers to recognize multiple code elements and treat them as 
equivalent, which complicates matching with no real benefit to offset 
the cost.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, 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

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2008 07:39:30 -0800

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic dot fr> wrote:

> Small show of hands about the possibility of a yet-to-be-done 
> companion registry, dedicated to "extra" information to help people 
> find the right tag. Do you consider it to be:
>
> 1) A good idea
> 2) A bad idea (I believe that it is a good summary of Mark Davis' 
> posting 
> http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg09271.html)

The more formal it is, the worse an idea it is.  People will rightly ask 
why two registries are needed.

This might be a suitable project for the World Language Documentation 
Centre <http://www.thewldc.org/>.

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From: Nicolas Krebs <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:09:08 +0100

>Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 20:03:04 +0100
>From: LB <[email-masked]>
>To: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
>CC: [email-masked]

>To avoid resuming the 1870 war, 

Why avoid or no avoid "resuming the 1870 war"? 

> could it be agreed that:
>
>1. linguistics is not an exact science
>2. several langtags can refer to the same language name, content,
>classification, filtering, locale file, ... whatever they are used for?
>3. the authoritative reference is the locutor/allocutor couple?
>
>What is discussed here belongs to local documentation organization (langtags
>concatenation), not to IETF protocols. The RFC should simply explain how all
>the possible forms of tagging can be handled at local application layer. How
>new real life tagging can be discovered and supported. IMHO going any
>further leads to being trapped into nationalistic issues, as expressed by
>Frank. They may have local but have no global legitimacy.

No, there can not currently be agreement on this. Next question?