Ietf-languages Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Thu Feb 15 22:35:38 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.

Yes.  That sounds likely.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com
>
>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.
>

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