Ietf-languages Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

Anthony Aristar aristar at linguistlist.org
Thu Feb 15 14:23:23 CET 2007


With all due respect, this seems like a very odd discussion from my 
perspective  as a linguistics professor.  The discussion seems to 
presuppose that all that matters is whether Microsoft is going to one 
day produce a version of Word in Middle High German or Old English, or 
how many texts exist in a language.

But the ISO 639 codes are used for much more than this.  In particular, 
they are used to ensure interoperability, allowing material of the same 
linguistic nature to be found in searches, and to be compared using the 
linguistic ontologies that are now being developed.  If I am a scholar 
searching for texts in Old English (or Old High German, for that 
matter) and everyone has been cavalier enough to code such material 
with eng and deu, what the search engines return will be utterly 
useless to me.  I am going to be flooded with such a quantity of 
material in Modern English and Modern German that searching through it 
will be essentially impossible.

So if you really believe that it doesn't matter if you code English 
material as eng, whatever its period, what you're really saying is that 
you don't really care about interoperability, and that you don't really 
care about scholarship.

                **************************************
Anthony Aristar, Director, Institute for Language Information & Technology
                   Professor of Linguistics
Moderator, LINGUIST               Principal Investigator, EMELD Project
Linguistics Program
Dept. of English                  aristar at linguistlist.org
Eastern Michigan University            2000 Huron River Dr, Suite 104
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
U.S.A.

URL: http://linguistlist.org/aristar/
                **************************************

> Mark Davis wrote:
>
> > Assume that old Czech is as different from modern as fro is from fr.
>
> But is this a real problem?  How much total literature is written
> and available in different variations of Czech?  My prejudice says
> that as a nation with a language and literature of its own, Czech
> is about as young as Finnish, Norwegian or Serbian, i.e. 19th
> century.  Can you give any concrete examples when not having a
> separate *code* for pre-renaissance Czech is a practical problem?
>
> Linguists of course have *names* for Swedish of all ages, but I
> see no real use for having ISO or the IETF specify language
> *codes*.  I could be wrong, but if so please enlighten and correct
> me.  Nobody is going to translate OpenOffice or Mozilla to the
> language spoken by vikings (Old Norse) or the Swedish used during
> the Lutheran reformation (called New Swedish, ironically).
>
> Yes, there is now a branch of Wikipedia in Old English
> (ang.wikipedia.org), but that is a rare exception.  I don't expect
> this to happen in other languages.  Ang has now 744 articles,
> compared to the 11,000 articles of the Latin Wikipedia.







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