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

"Phillips, Addison" <addison@amazon.com> Wed, 28 May 2008 20:58 UTC

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From: "Phillips, Addison" <addison@amazon.com>
To: Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>, LTRU Working Group <ltru@ietf.org>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 13:58:09 -0700
Thread-Topic: [Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?
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Subject: Re: [Ltru] Does 'de' really mean "only standard German"?
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> >
> > Well, you have your choice between de-mannheim or pfl-mannheim.
> Perhaps
> > both are worth registering.  I certainly don't claim to know.
>
> Limiting "de"  to mean "standard German" seems a non-useful narrowing.
>  Consider a clearer example: the many flavors of "Gastarbeiterdeutsch"
> (Guest-worker German).  These are clearly not "standard German", but I
> can't believe that their initial subtag should be anything other than
> "de".
>

This argument can easily be extended to any language one cares to name, since languages provide a wide range of expressiveness and people have varying degrees of idiosyncrasy or command of the language in question. In one of my presentations about language tags I quote this bit of introduction by Mark Twain which seems instructive here:

--
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
--

That language tags do not capture the full richness of human expression should not be surprising. Attempts to capture every nuance of a given language artifact in a single tag are counter-productive.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.



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