[tei-council] Extended language subtags must begin with the letter "s".???

[Martin Holmes]

HI Chris, (copying to Council list)

On 12-06-28 05:57 PM, Christian Wittern wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> I can't post to tei-council, so you might forward my answer there.
>
> On 2012-06-29 05:52, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> I never saw Chris's response -- maybe he just responded to you, or the
>> list rejected his mail.
>>
>> I've been reading through that section, and he's right that the extension
>> subtag "s" is _possible_, assuming that the "s" extension is "allocated to
>> a registration authority via the mechanism described in Section 3.7". This
>> tells us that IANA is responsible for the assigning single-letter subtags.
>> The only such list I can find on the IANA site is this one:
>>
>> <http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tag-extensions-registry>
>>
>> which defines only two, "t" and "u".
>>
>> So I'm pretty sure that although these are plausible examples, they're not
>> actually real, unless someone has registered the singleton subtag, and I
>> can find no evidence of that.
>>
>> I'm copying Chris again in case he can remember where these examples
>> actually came from. I think we can say for sure, though, that the sentence
>> "Extended language subtags must begin with the letter "s"." is nonsense
>> and should be removed. Unless I hear any objections, I'll do that tomorrow.
>
> Quite right.  I do not remember exactly where these examples are from, but I
> remember that I copied stuff from the then current BP47 document (or maybe
> its predecessor), which might have included these.   But as I see now, these
> examples are nonsense and should be removed.

I think only the bit about "Extended language subtags must begin with 
the letter "s"." is nonsense; the examples are plausible, but perhaps 
not ideal because I don't think they actually could be used.

> Just as a matter of curiosity, how would you then encode "the Southern Min
> language of the macrolanguage Chinese as spoken in China written in
> simplified Characters"?

I honestly have no idea. The only things in the official list which are 
close is this:

Type: language
Subtag: nan
Description: Min Nan Chinese
Added: 2009-07-29
Macrolanguage: zh

which would formerly have been written zh-nan, but should now be written 
simply as nan, if I understand correctly. I think you could therefore do 
this:

nan-Hans-CN

to create the intended combination.

> Fortunately, in the CBETA context we did not
> encounter this:-)
>
> I would not object to made up examples, as long as they are correct
> according to the current rules.

Nor would I, but I think it's simpler to use real examples where they 
can be easily found.

Cheers,
Martin