The limit of language codes

[CE Whitehead]

>
>Hoi,
>The modern languages have a big advantage. They are the languages that are 
>spoken today. It is therefore relatively easy to treat them with bold 
>strokes. When you start drilling down, you can have linguistic entities 
>that are considered "dialects", you can have different orthographies.

Yes, this is what happens.
>
>For me languages are a living thing and new words make their appearance 
>continuously. They are completely apart from how we would like to mark 
>language usage using meta tags. As words make their appearance, they do 
>differentiate the language. When we want to mark them with meta data, it 
>would still be "Dutch" ie nl but the meta data for a movie, a documentary 
>would still need to include the moment when this particular recording was 
>created.

Yes, this is helpful; I wish I always as a content creator had access to the 
headers and such but sometimes a page is embedded in another and the host 
provides no access.
>
>In OmegaWiki, we need to tag linguistic entities. For the use of English, 
>we have decided that when a word is spelled the same in contemporary en-UK 
>and en-US, we only record it as en. This is satisfactory for us. Many words 
>have only their use limited in time; who still thinks and talks of Internet 
>as the "digital super highway" nowadays ? For a dictionary you identify the 
>dates when they made their appearance and when they were seen last. When 
>you want to divide a language in time slots, it is really arbitrary where 
>you create the lines. Italian is a constructed language, this is also true 
>for German. Orthographies are a relatively recent invention and 
>consequently it is not really feasible to create spell checkers before a 
>certain age. An age that differs per language...
>
>The notion of having tags for historical languages makes sense when these 
>language are dead. Tagging any other way is at best imprecise. So please do 
>create a gazillion new tags for historical "languages", I am not sure that 
>they are worth the paper they are written on. I am also afraid that they 
>detract from what we have to achieve first; the correct tagging of content 
>of contemporary material. With only 15% tagged of material on the Internet, 
>there is plenty of convincing that we need to do. Convincing that using our 
>tags /is /relevant.
>
>Thanks,
>     Gerard

I hope that we can both tag the modern and historical; both are out there 
and both need to be tagged.

Thanks.

C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

_________________________________________________________________
Invite your Hotmail contacts to join your friends list with Windows Live 
Spaces 
http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwsp0070000001msn/direct/01/?href=http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us