Ietf-languages Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

[Lars Aronsson]

Anthony Aristar wrote:

> 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.

Now you are talking about English and German, but the specific 
example was Old Czech.  I'm not sure if that is the texts by Jan 
Hus or the even older ballads of the Middle Ages.  But any way 
it's Czech before the revival of the language and literature in 
the 1780s.  So my specific question is how much such literature 
you have available and how hard it really is to handle it without 
having a code for Old Czech?  Isn't it rather the case that you 
have 20 texts and you know exactly where they are?

If the language of Otto's encyclopedia (28 volumes, 1888-1908), 
which is available on CDROM and which I hope will one day become 
available on the Internet, is different from today's Czech, then I 
guess these two language versions need codes, so they can be 
separated, perhaps even automatically translated.  But I'm curious 
if we will ever find any use for automatic processing of the texts 
by Jan Hus', on an order that really requires a special language 
code.

Instead of further abstractions, generalizations, national pride 
and lingustic snobbery, I'm asking for real examples where not 
having a standardized code for Old Czech is a real, practical 
problem.  If I see such examples, I can learn how codes for 
equally old versions of the Scandinavian languages could be 
useful.  But today I see no such uses.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se