Re: [Ltru] rechartering to handle 639-6

["Phillips, Addison" <[e-mail]>]

> 
> > Any proposal to assign variants on a systematic, formulaic basis
> -- not
> > three or four, but dozens or hundreds or thousands -- ought to
> make us
> > stop and wonder why we don't establish an extension for the
> purpose
> > instead:
> 
> The point of creating an extension is to provide additional
> orthogonal
> information that is packaged up with the language tag.  (IMHO this
> is
> rather silly, as few databases allow only one field, but who knows.)
> They aren't meant to be used for specification that of language
> variant
> information; that is semantically part of the language tag and
> belongs
> in the variant field.
> 

Well, that isn't necessarily so. I know that the RFC-to-be says that extensions are "orthogonal". But an extension could be created that wasn’t entirely orthogonal to language identification. It might provide finer-grained identification (such as 639-6 is purported to provide) than variants might provide. I think that having an extension proposal would actually be the test of whether it were an appropriate use or not. Just as having 639-6 in a relatively mature state is an important pre-condition to its potential incorporation into the corpus of BCP 47.

Addison