Unilingua

Tex Texin tex at xencraft.com
Fri Sep 16 09:20:57 CEST 2005


Doug,

(I am replying to your mail, but it is not directed at you personally.)

Why do we want to register things that have no practical use or
significance, for which there are almost no documents to give the tag to,
and yet make our software tables larger and require more time to explain
what it represents than the value of recognizing the code?

Isn't it ok to have some number of documents for which we say, yes the
contents are in a language which isn't covered by tags, so if you want a
description it needs to be annotated in some other way.

If somebody has a unilingua text they can label it with x-unilingua and note
somewhere what it represents.

We should reel the registry back into being something that internet
engineers need for practical internet applications and have some form of
80/20 rule related to language categorization. I recognize the needs of
linguists to distinguish languages with subtle but important differences,
but I don't see that general software or internet applications should be
burdened with the overhead. This has all got to fit in my watch someday. The
registry should not be a museum for every possible variant that ever existed
or was postulated. Maybe in addition to 50 documents to register a tag we
should require there be 50 engineers that testify they care to recognize the
distinction. (kidding, but only slightly...)

tex


Doug Ewell wrote:
> 
> Anyone ever heard of Unilingua?
> 
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unilingua
> 
> It's yet another constructed language, but unlike Esperanto and the
> like, the vocabulary and grammar are built from scratch on "logical" and
> "scientific" principles.  There is no connection to vocabulary from
> Romance, Germanic, or other natural languages, except for the puzzlingly
> Latinate name "Unilingua" (perhaps "Moradad" would have been more
> fitting).
> 
>     Ud ce utcaundrun bi Unilingua.
>     This is a sample sentence in Unilingua.
> 
> Unilingua was invented by a French author, Noubar Agopoff, in 1965.
> Apparently he was just as serious in his effort as Dr. Zamenhof, though
> not as successful.  This is not a hobbyist endeavor, like so many of the
> "conlangs" found on Langmaker and other Internet sites.
> 
> Any reason why this should *not* be a candidate for registration, either
> under ISO/DIS 639-3 or, failing that, under RFC 3066 or its proposed
> successor?  I doubt it would meet the 50-document requirement for ISO
> 639-2.  There are already code elements in ISO 639-2 and -3 for several
> well-known constructed languages, including Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua,
> Interlingue, Lojban, and more.
> 
> --
> Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
> http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf-languages mailing list
> Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex at XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
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