ID for language-invariant strings

[Randy Presuhn]

Hi -

> From: "Tracey, Niall" <niall.tracey at logica.com>
> To: "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>; <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 3:00 AM
> Subject: RE: ID for language-invariant strings
...
> As this value is intended for non-linguistic use, I don't see a problem with ZXX.
...

I'd be more comfortable with that if there weren't certain pesky phenomena.
For example, according to a native speaker friend, in Russian if "Helvetica"
is the subject of a sentence, in the past tense the verb would get a feminine
ending, while if it were "Courier", the masculine form would be used.  Thus
an application putting these non-localizable strings into localized content
would indeed need to treat them as having linguistic properties similar to
those of other foreign words or expressions that might show up.

Randy