Re: lowercased Unicode language tags ? (was:ISO 15924)

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@Leca-Marti.org)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 05:23:12 CDT


On Monday, May 03, 2004 4:36 AM
John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> va escriure:

> Philippe Verdy scripsit:
>
>> And there are also ISO 3166-2 codes for administrative regions in
>> countries (such as FR2B for the department of Haute-Corse in France).
>
> I think those are usually written FR-2B, though I do not have access
> to 3166-2 itself.

You think right. See p.23 of
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/03updates-on-iso-3166/nli-
2.pdf (free access).

>> Languages need not only distinctions by countries but also by regions
>> in countries, if this is needed. So Catalan in the Spanish Canaries

About as useful as ro-FR, and less probable...

>> would use the ISO3166 code "ESCI" after the language tag "es"

Please use "ca". I know that Catalan is as much "Spanish" as Castilian is.
But the guys that designed ISO 639 decided otherwise (and this is probably
more mnemonic for many people, many of them native speaker of "es"). So it
had to be this way.

>> (the complete code would be "es-Latn-ESCI"

This is completely frivolous.

>> or just "es-ESCI", distinct
>> from "es-Latn" which could be used also for Castillan.

Spelled Castilian in English.
Looks like Philippe is mixing Baleares with Canary here...

> Catalan is not Spanish, and has its own code.

Sorry to contradict you slightly, John. Please note that this issue is
sensitive for some Catalans here in Spain, so I mention it for the sake of
everybody here knowing it.

> RFC 3066 permits registration of sub-country codes if needed,

Sure.

> but they must be registered explicitly to be used.

Where is it spelled?

Particularly when I read
   Tags constructed wholly from the codes that are assigned
   interpretations by this chapter do not need to be registered with
   IANA before use.
inside clause 2, which otherwise says that the 2nd subtag when 2 letter
designates a country, and also says that 3rd and next subtags do not have
semantical restrictions.

Doug Ewell also wrote:
> There isn't actually such a code as ES-CI (note the hyphen, which makes
> it distinguishable from a 4-letter script code).

Yes it is. Spain (as well as other countries) does have two levels of
administrative regions encoded in ISO/IEC 3166-2, recognising the dual
structure of its regional systems, with at the same time 17 autonomous
regions as well as 50 (or 52) provinces. When the limits are the same, there
is no distinction in codes. When they the autonomia is larger, case of
Canary Islands which is made of 2 provinces, designers of 3166-2 invented a
2-letter code from the English name of the autonomous region, that means
nothing and is not used here in Spain, but serves to designates it.

So yes, ES-CI does exist, and indeed designates the Canary Islands.

Antoine



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