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[Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?

"Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com> Tue, 27 May 2008 19:04 UTC

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From: Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>
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Subject: [Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?
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Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@icu-project.org>
> To: "John Cowan" <cowan@ccil.org>
> Cc: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>; "LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 11:38 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Consensus call: extlang
...
> (Magically, "German" means only
> "Standard German", and "French" means "Standard French", and so on, but
> "Arabic" doesn't mean "Standard Arabic",...)

I'm very surprised by this claim.  I thought 'de' encompassed any variety
of German that wasn't covered by some other tag (like gsw), just as 'fr'
encompasses many flavors of French.  It would be only slightly more
extreme to claim that 'en' means American English, simply because that
variety makes up a significant percentage of the content tagged 'en'.

Regardless of whether we use extlangs, it's becoming clearer
and clearer to me that we should be careful to advise
*against* practices like using naked 'zh' for content known to be Mandarin,
or naked 'ar' for content known to be standard Arabic, even when there's
substantial legacy data.  To do otherwise would lead to a practical narrowing
of the subtags' meanings, and to dangerous analogies like "de is limited to
standard German." That would be a very bad thing.

Randy

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