RE: [Ltru] Extended language tags

[Peter Constable <[e-mail]>]

From: Addison Phillips [mailto:[e-mail]]

> Let me rephrase Mark's Breton case: when you want Chippewa, any old
> Ojibwa (its macrolanguage) -- which might be a language such as Ottawa
> -- will not do...

> When considered like this, the Breton vs. French example is more useful.
> Otherwise it is pointless.

Well, what this points out is that the macrolanguage cases are not all comparable.

- Some are like Chinese in having one encompassed language (I'll call this the Major Language Variety - MLV) that is quite developed and probably intelligible to a considerable extent to speakers of all the encompassed languages.

- Some are like Ojibwa in not having one such MLV among the encompassed languages.

For purposes of lookup, the MLV of the former cases may well be an acceptable fallback for the other encompassed languages. But in the latter cases, there is no MLV, and none of the encompassed languages is likely to be an acceptable fallback in general.

For purposes of filtering, if the records are all tagged specifically (Mandarin, Yue, etc. instead of just "zh"; "Ottawa, Chippewa, etc. instead of just "oji"), then a user can always get what they want -- narrow or specifc. But, of course, records aren't always going to be tagged specifically, so let's consider those scenarios. In the Ojibwa-type cases, results using "oji" as language-range will likely be comparably good (or bad) for Chippewa as for Ottawa (or etc.). In the Chinese-type cases, results using "zh" as language-range are likely to be weighted in favour of Mandarin versus Yue, etc.


I haven't thought yet how this all relates to the issue of xxx-yyy vs. yyy.


Peter

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