ID for language-invariant strings

Tracey, Niall niall.tracey at logica.com
Thu Mar 20 12:00:46 CET 2008


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Peter Constable
> When it comes to family names (OT name ID 1 or name ID 16
> or name ID 21), though, these are generally linguistic.
> They may have some abbreviations, as in "Arno Pro Smbd
> SmText", or some non-linguistic qualifiers, as in
> "Blackletter 686 BT" ("BT" = Bitstream is a linguistic
> abbreviation, but "686" is non-linguistic).
> And there are the rare exceptions: in a sample of over
> 12000 fonts I'm looking at, there are about 95 (< 0.8%)
> that have purely-numeric family names. Generally,
> though, the names are linguistic.

But the point I'm trying to make is that while the data may usually be of a linguistic form, the *field* that you are entering the data into is non-linguistic. The table you showed us was a list of localised font names with the language of use as a key for lookup. The value you are querying here is not for use in any language

As this value is intended for non-linguistic use, I don't see a problem with ZXX.

It is entirely impossible when defining an arbitrary data field to guarantee it will never be contain linguistic content. A JPEG image could be linguistic content (eg a scan of a magazine article), or non-linguistic (eg a still life). Similarly a plain text field could contain a hex code or a linguistic sentence.

We don't need to know anything about the author's language to use the string as intended. I'd argue that the data as you have described is intrinsically arbitrary -- any linguistic content is extrinsic to the system. Hence from a system's point of view, the data is non-linguistic.

OK, so ZXX is defined as "No Linguistic Content" and I'm possibly overinterpreting this to "Non-linguistic Content", but without interpreting it this way there is no point in maintaining the ZXX tag.

Níall.
Views expressed in this email do not reflect the policies of Logica UK.

This e-mail and any attachment is for authorised use by the intended recipient(s) only. It may contain proprietary material, confidential information and/or be subject to legal privilege. It should not be copied, disclosed to, retained or used by, any other party. If you are not an intended recipient then please promptly delete this e-mail and any attachment and all copies and inform the sender. Thank you.




More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list