Year

[han.steenwijk at unipd.it]

Quoting "Addison Phillips [wM]" <aphillips at webmethods.com>:


> The registry can be used for *informative* registration of years, I
> think.
> In other words, you could still register a year subtag. It isn't
> required in
> order to use the subtag, but it is helpful to users to have that
> information.

I completely agree with you that registration would be most helpful. As your 
example "grc-700BCE" for the Iliad shows, a year tag may indicate a point in 
time, a date ante quem (my encyclopedia says that the Illiad was probably 
written somewhere in the 8th century BC) or a date post quem (the existing 
de-year tags).

> By reserving numeric tags for years, though, we provide a
> clear
> mechanism for linguists and scholars to tag information in a
> historical/chronological dimension (in the same way that there is a
> geographical dimension in the region subtag).

I find the basic idea very attractive.

> I'm not sure that ranges make sense. Historically it seems like
> year-based
> subtags have referred to the start of the new regime.

The history of year-based tags consists of the two tags "de-1901" and "de-1996" 
and their variants. That may be too little for generalising on possible use 
cases.

> So if you have two
> year subtags, they presumably fall on boundaries, not in the middle
> somewhere, especially since tag matching currently is binary (a subtag
> matches or does not match, there is no semantic comparison).

To be more clear here, with my example "sl-rozaj-1801/1900" (a period including 
starting and end point) I did not intend to have tags like "sl-rozaj-1845" (a 
point) being matched by the former tag.

As things stand right now (without informative registration), a period is 
indicated implicitely by the existence of a second tag that delimits the period 
inclusively started by a first tag, eg. "sl-rozaj-1801" indicates the 19th 
century because the application knows(?) that a second tag "sl-rozaj-1901" also 
exists. So if I want to indicate pre-19th century Resian, I have to use a tag 
with an arbitrary year like "sl-rozaj-1001" that is delimited because of the 
existence of a tag "sl-rozaj-1801".

> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Addison
> 
> Addison P. Phillips
> Director, Globalization Architecture
> webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility
> http://www.webMethods.com
> Chair, W3C Internationalization (I18N) Working Group
> Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force
> http://www.w3.org/International
> 
> Internationalization is an architecture.
> It is not a feature.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no
> > [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no]On Behalf Of
> > han.steenwijk at unipd.it
> > Sent: Friday, November 21, 2003 5:33 AM
> > To: ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> > Subject: Year
> >
> >
> > Hi Allison, hi Mark
> >
> > The exact meaning of the year tag remains somewhat
> > underspecified. As a year tag
> > would be used without registration, it is not possible to give
> > the needed extra
> > information in another place, like in the RFC 3066 registration forms
> for
> > "de-1901" and "de-1996":
> >
> > Tag to be registered       : de-1901
> > English name of language   : German, traditional orthography
> >
> > Tag to be registered       : de-1996
> > English name of language   : German, orthography of 1996
> >
> > As long as we agree that only orthography reforms are to be
> > indicated by the
> > year tag, that may be no big problem. But I forsee another
> > possible use of this
> > tag, namely to indicate specific periods in  the historical
> > development of a
> > language. For instance, if I wanted to indicate a language
> > variant as pre-19th
> > century, I could be tempted to use the year tag, like in
> > "sl-rozaj-1801". Two
> > problems arise:
> >
> > 1) one needs to know that this does not refer to an orthography
> reform;
> > 2) one needs to know that the period before 1801 is meant, and
> > not the period
> > after that date.
> >
> > Maybe one could write something  like "sl-rozaj-/1801" for years
> > that are meant
> > as the finishing point of a period and something like "de-1996/"
> > for years that
> > are meant as the starting point of a period. (Maybe the forward slash
> is
> > unusable for some technical reason, but that is another point.)
> > Elaborating on this scheme, one could write something like
> > "sl-rozaj-1801/1900"
> > to indicate a 19th century language variant.
> > If, however, the year tag is only meant to indicate orthography
> > reforms, then
> > this should be clearly stated. But the regard for "BCE" dates
> > makes me suspect,
> > that more than orthography reforms can be identified by it.
> >
> > Han
> >
> >
> > =================
> > Prof. Han Steenwijk
> > Universita di Padova
> > Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche e Slave
> > Sezione di Slavistica
> > Via Beldomandi, 1
> > I-35139 Padova
> >
> > e-mail: han.steenwijk at unipd.it
> > tel.: (39) 049 8278669
> > fax:  (39) 049 8278679
> >
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> 
> 



=================
Prof. Han Steenwijk
Universita di Padova
Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Germaniche e Slave
Sezione di Slavistica
Via Beldomandi, 1
I-35139 Padova

e-mail: han.steenwijk at unipd.it
tel.: (39) 049 8278669
fax:  (39) 049 8278679

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