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

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.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 4:46 PM Phake Nick <c933103@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 <cowan@ccil.org> 寫道：
>
>> 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
>> <http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan>        cowan@ccil.org
>> 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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>