Subject: Re: [Ltru] Latn and fonipa

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:40:53 -0600

"Phillips, Addison" <addison at amazon dot com> wrote:

>>> There are other similar examples. 'baku1926' implies Latn too. 
>>> 'monoton' implies 'Grek'.
>>
>> I agree entirely. But there is nothing in the registry or standard 
>> that says this. So I think we need a suppress script for these 
>> variants.
>
> No. We don't.

Way no.

> We have rule #1: Tag Content Wisely, complete with several pages of 
> text saying this already. We could go on adding more registry cruft 
> until the crack of doom. At some point, we have to let people tag 
> stuff.

And in particular, we have to stop thinking of Suppress-Script as the 
ultimate crutch to guide people toward correct tagging.

Suppress-Script was invented to solve ONE problem, namely that RFC 4646 
introduced the script subtag and placed it between the language and 
region subtags, which would cause existing matching logic to fail if:

(1) the matching logic made the faulty assumption, never stated as such 
in RFC 1766 or 3066, that nothing could ever come between the language 
and region subtags, and

(2) the matching logic performed only exact matching or 
remove-from-right prefix matching, which is still true today, and

(3) tags started appearing with script subtags that were probably 
redundant because the written form of the language in question is 
overwhelmingly written in that script.

Suppress-Script was meant to help solve this problem by taking element 
(3) out of the equation, helping taggers to identify and thus avoid 
unnecessary script subtags that would cause this particular matching 
assumption ("nothing between language and region") to fail.

It was never meant to apply across the board to cases that have nothing 
to do with maintaining compatibility with incompletely implemented 1766 
and 3066 parsers, nor to serve as an overall guide to avoiding 
unnecessary subtags.  If it were, we could have invented a 
Suppress-Region field as well, steering taggers away from things like 
"kl-GL" where the overwhelming majority of Greenlandic is of the variety 
spoken in Greenland.  And we could have invented a mechanism to suppress 
variant subtags as well.  But tags like that do not cause the same sort 
of grief for existing code that unnecessary script subtags reportedly 
would have caused.

People who are in a position to tag monotonic Greek content don't need a 
specific annotation or field in the Registry to figure out that there 
might be something redundant about using 'Grek' (script subtag meaning 
"Greek") together with 'monoton' (variant subtag meaning "Monotonic 
Greek") -- not just "probably" redundant, like "kl-GL", but demonstrably 
redundant.  But neither including nor excluding the script subtag should 
cause problems for matching; this is not part of the 1766/3066 matching 
problem.

Anyway.  Way no.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Arvada, 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

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:50:46 -0600

Martin Hosken <martin underscore hosken at sil dot org> wrote:

> The question is how do we turn 'tag wisely' into a set of 
> canonicalisation rules.

We don't.

> If we want wisdom in how canonical tags are made, then we have to 
> codify that wisdom somehow.

No, we don't.  It has to do with human judgment.  That's what makes it 
wisdom, not just information or knowledge.

I mean, yeah, it would be possible to add something to the Registry that 
says, in essence, "Don't use 'Latn' and 'fonipa' together, because 
'fonipa' implies 'Latn' and so it would be redundant."  And we could do 
the same for 'fonupa' because the situation is exactly the same.  And 
then we could decide to add a similar rule for Greenlandic, and so on.

But we haven't solved any Actual Problems, in the sense that putting 
script subtags before region subtags was shown to be an Actual Problem 
for brain-damaged parsers written by people who misunderstood RFC 
1766/3066.  All we've solved is a theoretical problem that a parser 
might fail to match tags that aren't exactly equivalent (i.e. 
"en-Latn-fonipa" is not exactly equivalent to "en-fonipa" so we have to 
canonicalize one to the other).  Such a parser would be brain-dead, not 
just -damaged, and there's no need to try to cater to something like 
that.