Saying that it is not as important is, I agree, your prejudice. Importance is in the eye of the beholder, and ISO 639-3 has 7,500 languages, which make distinctions that to people concerned with Czech will be far less important than the difference between old Czech and modern Czech.
<br><br><span style="font-style: italic;">Moreover, one cannot fixate on the exact example used.</span> There are plenty of
others, because very few languages have "Old" variants in 639-3. The principle is the same for any other language: do we presume that the code means only the modern variant, or covers all historical variations? We need to get an answer for that; without that answer, we can't know whether to accept or reject historic variant proposals.
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<br>Mark<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Lars Aronsson</b> <<a href="mailto:lars@aronsson.se">lars@aronsson.se</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Mark Davis wrote:<br><br>> Assume that old Czech is as different from modern as fro is from fr.<br><br>But is this a real problem? How much total literature is written<br>and available in different variations of Czech? My prejudice says
<br>that as a nation with a language and literature of its own, Czech<br>is about as young as Finnish, Norwegian or Serbian, i.e. 19th<br>century. Can you give any concrete examples when not having a<br>separate *code* for pre-renaissance Czech is a practical problem?
<br><br>Linguists of course have *names* for Swedish of all ages, but I<br>see no real use for having ISO or the IETF specify language<br>*codes*. I could be wrong, but if so please enlighten and correct<br>me. Nobody is going to translate OpenOffice or Mozilla to the
<br>language spoken by vikings (Old Norse) or the Swedish used during<br>the Lutheran reformation (called New Swedish, ironically).<br><br>Yes, there is now a branch of Wikipedia in Old English<br>(<a href="http://ang.wikipedia.org">
ang.wikipedia.org</a>), but that is a rare exception. I don't expect<br>this to happen in other languages. Ang has now 744 articles,<br>compared to the 11,000 articles of the Latin Wikipedia.<br><br>I'm scanning old books, and I'm starting to see a practical
<br>problem with different orthographies and spelling reforms, similar<br>to those addressed with the IETF defined codes for German de-1901<br>and de-1996. Analogous to these codes, we could perhaps find use<br>for sv-1801, sv-1889, sv-1906, da-1775, da-1892 and da-1948,
<br>because we now have *significant amounts* of text online in each<br>of these language versions. But before 1775/1801 the orthography<br>of Swedish and Danish varies so heavily with each work, that it<br>becomes pretty much useless to try to identify more versions.
<br>And before that time, there is also so small amounts of literature<br>available, that any automatic processing becomes insignificant.<br><br><br><br>--<br> Lars Aronsson (<a href="mailto:lars@aronsson.se">lars@aronsson.se
</a>)<br> Aronsson Datateknik - <a href="http://aronsson.se">http://aronsson.se</a><br>_______________________________________________<br>Ietf-languages mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no">Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no
</a><br><a href="http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages">http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Mark