From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 17:48:07 CDT
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> ISO 15924 alpha-4 codes are already distinguishable from ISO 639 and ISO
> 3166 codes, simply by virtue of being four letters long.
Not really: Many ISO 3166-3 codes (for former countries or territories or those
that
have changed their code) are also 4 letters.
For example ZRCD designates the former Zaïre (now Dem. Rep. of Congo), DDDE the
former Dem. Rep. of Germany (now unified with Germany), BUMM is the former
Kingdom of Burma (now.Myanmar).
And there are also ISO 3166-2 codes for administrative regions in countries
(such as FR2B for the department of Haute-Corse in France).
Languages need not only distinctions by countries but also by regions in
countries, if this is needed.
So Catalan in the Spanish Canaries would use the ISO3166 code "ESCI" after the
language tag "es" (the complete code would be "es-Latn-ESCI" or just "es-ESCI",
distinct from "es-Latn" which could be used also for Castillan.
Lettercase can make a difference here to differentiate a script and a region
code. Suppose that there's a ISO3166-2 code "LATN" (a region code "TN" in Lao?),
how will you interpret "lo-LATN"?
Is it the Lao language spoken in that particular region of Lao (the country),
and written with its natural script, or is it "standard" Lao written with the
Latin script ?
I think that the wording of TUS 4.0 chapter 15 may create confusion, unless this
confusion is already handled in RFC 3066 related to language tags (in which ISO
639, ISO 15924 and ISO 3166 are only defining a part of its subtags). The
solution to this apparent contradiction is to find in the successor of RFC
3066... And Unicode should then be updated to make a better normative reference
than just the current RFC 3066...
If not, then the normative lowercase folding of language tags in Unicode 4 is to
be amended... Clearly there's a conflict here.
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