Re: [Ltru] Review of 4646bis-10, macrolanguages in section 4.1

[Addison Phillips <[e-mail]>]

Firstly, let me express my Deep Annoyance at getting emails with 
proposed text with line breaks and big wads of whitespace in front of 
each line. Yes, a regular expression will tame the beast, but I'd prefer 
to cut-and-paste a bit more :-)

I incorporated the below with only very minor tidying.

Addison

John Cowan wrote:
> Because of the thicket of rewordings in this part, I'm just presenting
> my suggested revised text here.  It's very important to make sure
> that we don't talk about "dialects" or "sub-languages" here.  Also,
> I've used "Macrolanguage" for the header only, but "macrolanguage"
> for the languages.
> 
> The affected text begins "Languages with a Macrolanguage field" and ends
> "did not specify zh-Hans-CN in their request.)".
> 
>         Some of the languages in the registry are labeled
>         "macrolanguages" by ISO 639-3, which defines the term as
>         "clusters of closely-related language varieties that [...] can
>         be considered distinct individual languages, yet in certain
>         usage contexts a single language identity for all is needed".
>         These correspond to codes registered in ISO 639-2 as single
>         languages that were found to correspond to more than one language
>         in ISO 639-3.  The languages encompassed by a macrolanguage
>         contain a Macrolanguage header in the registry; the macrolanguages
>         themselves are not specially marked.
> 
>         It is always permitted, and sometimes useful, to tag an
>         encompassed language using the subtag for its macrolanguage.
>         However, the Macrolanguage field doesn't define what the
>         relationship is between the encompassed language and its
>         macrolanguage, nor does it define how languages encompassed by the
>         same macrolanguage are related to each other.  In some cases, In
>         some cases, one of the encompassed languages serves as a standard
>         form for the entire macrolanguage and is frequently identified
>         with it; in other cases there is no dominant language, and the
>         macrolanguage simply serves as a cover term for the entire group.
> 
>         Applications MAY use macrolanguage information to improve matching
>         or language negotiation.  For example, the information that 'sr'
>         (Serbian) and 'hr' (Croatian) share a macrolanguage expresses
>         a closer relation between those languages than between, say,
>         'sr' (Serbian) and 'ma' (Macedonian).  It is valid to use the
>         subtag of the encompassed language or of the macrolanguage to
>         form language tags.  However, many matching applications will
>         not be aware of the relationship between the languages.  Care in
>         selecting which subtags are used is crucial to interoperability.
> 
>         In general, use the most specific tag.  However, where the
>         macrolanguage tag has been historically used to denote a dominant
>         encompassed language, it SHOULD be used in place of the subtag
>         specific to that encompassed language unless it is necessary
>         to clearly distinguish the macrolanguage as a whole from the
>         dominant language variety.
> 
> 	In particular, the Chinese family of languages call for special
> 	consideration.	Because the written form is very similar for most
> 	languages having 'zh' as a macrolanguage (and because historically
> 	subtags for the various encompassed languages were not available),
> 	languages such as 'yue' (Cantonese) have historically used
> 	either 'zh' or a tag (now grandfathered) beginning with 'zh'.
> 	This means that macrolanguage information can be usefully
> 	applied when searching for content or when providing fallbacks
> 	in language negotiation.  For example, the information that 'yue'
> 	has a macrolangauge of 'zh' could be used in the Lookup algorithm
> 	to fallback from a request for "yue-Hans-CN" to "zh-Hans-CN"
> 	without losing the script and region information (even though
> 	the user did not specify "zh-Hans-CN" in their request).
> 
> --
> John Cowan              [e-mail]          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> Any day you get all five woodpeckers is a good day.  --Elliotte Rusty Harold
> 
> 
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-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.


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