The limit of language codes

[CE Whitehead]

Hi, Gerard, and others, my responses are below!

>On 2/15/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at wiktionaryz.org> wrote:
>>When you want to divide a
>>language in time slots, it is really arbitrary where you create the
>>lines.
>
>Just like dialects.
>
>>The notion of having tags for historical languages makes sense when
>>these language are dead. Tagging any other way is at best imprecise.
>
>I don't see why drawing a line between Old English and Middle English
>would be any more or any less complex if English were dead. Or even
>Middle English and English, since all the complexity is in a
>relatively small set of documents around 1500.
>
>>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.
>
>What we have to do first? This is not a missionary group. My primary
>goal is to create a set of language tags usable for Project Gutenberg,
>for which also having them supported by XML and other people is a
>great help. A large percentage of the books I personally do for
>Project Gutenberg date back before 1700, whether in modern editions or
>original facsimiles. That's what I'm most concerned about tagging. The
>use of these tags by other organizations and standards using language
>tagging is very convenient, because having one standard makes things
>easier for me. As to whether webpages are tagged, that's Google's
>problem; I could care less. I'm not here to achieve that, and I
>suspect many others aren't either.

Hi, I think that by supplying subtags for historical content we will get 
more of what is on the web tagged regardless, ancient, modern, in-between, 
half-half!

And no matter what, this group has to be receptive to new subtags, for 
either old or modern languages, when such subtags are requested.  (I thought 
the motto was be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you 
request or something like that.)

In any case, as you've said, it's hardly more difficult to tag an ancient 
language than a modern or vice versa (living languages keep changing, but 
people can also dig up new documents in the case of old languages).

Once we are clear on a few things,
(1) that we cannot define a macrolanguage here; that we have to wait on 
that;
(2) that the language subtags we currently have mean the modern language, so 
if a historical version is significantly different, requests for a subtag 
for the historical language are in their right and requests for a subtag for 
a variant probably have to be amended (so that the subtag is for a language) 
,
then we are ready to go.

More content will get properly tagged and be more usable to more people 
regardless.

(As for current content in any case, there are some sort-of commercial sites 
where content is tagged as being 'everything out there' so as to get the 
maximum number of hits with search engines.  So there is some stuff we maybe 
do not need to worry too much about how it is tagged.  But that's another 
matter.  The rest of it, we've got to permit the creation of proper subtags 
for, and of course, above all, we've got to make sure that we've got the 
subtags we need for our own content, because that's why most of us are here, 
right.)


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

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