Pending requests

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Thu Nov 26 23:04:32 CET 2015


On 26 Nov 2015, at 21:30, Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14 at telia.com> wrote:

>> But we aren’t judging Basic English. We’re identifying it with a subtag. 
>> 
> Yes, but as Mark (and, I think, Shawn) say: this is of very marginal use, and should be at very low priority, and could wait, perhaps indefinitely.

To what end? This is a volunteer effort. What benefit is there in waiting? 

> With regard to wpsimple, I don't like it, since it is (more or less) for Wikipedia only (and then only for one or a few languages); even though Wikipedia is "a pretty darn'd high-volume site”.

The specific simple variety of English for which a subtag has been sought is precisely the one used on the Wikipedia, as defined there. en-wpsimple is well-defined by the Wikipedia. en-simple could be anything by anybody. 

> [Regarding the CEFR scheme]
> 
> It's not particularly novel (it dates back to 1991, though it has been revised since). Nor is it particularly unknown. Especially not in Europe, but it is spreading around the world (ok, the latter is novel, and it is far from completely world-wide). But of the systems I have seen, it seems to be the only one with potential to become used world-wide in reasonable near-time.

OK.

> "not about classification of textual [or audio/video] content": Formally you  may be right. But:
> 
> 1) It can be interpreted as referring to content (and regularly is, but so far mostly for language education material, end then still be gradually building vocabulary, grammar, spelling, pronunciation, to the next level); there is of course no exactness here.
> 2) Is there another widely recognised scheme for referring explicitly to level of the content (text/audio/video)? "We" should not invent our own scheme.

I think that ranking levels of simplicity is way outside the scope of our project. ISO 639 is codes for the representation of names of languages. Our subtags are too, just at a different level of granularity. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/



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