Your quotation below omits the true author, and may leave the impression that I wrote a number of paragraphs that I do not agree with and did not write. I only wrote "Assume that old Czech ..." -- someone else wrote the "But is this a real problem...."
<br><br>> 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>...<br><br>That being said, there are two models that ISO could be using.
<br><ol><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Overlapping. </span>'eng' means any English, modern or historic. 'ang' means specifically Old English, a subset of 'eng'. 'ces' means any Czech. There is no tag specifically for Old Czech.
<br></li><ol><li>so I could tag Beowulf with 'ang' or 'eng', but Shakespeare, Austen, and Robin Williams only with 'eng'.</li><li>Smil Flaška z Pardubic and Václav Havel are both tagged with 'ces'.
</li><li>Requests for BCP 47 variant tags for Shakespearean English (en-SHAKESPR) or old Czech (cs-OLDCZECH) would be legitimate.</li><li>A request for a variant tag for only modern English (en-MODENGL), thus excluding Old English, would be legitimate.
<br></li><span></span></ol><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Disjoint. </span>'eng' means only modern English, 'ang' means Old English, 'ces' means only modern Czech. There is no tag at all (currently) for Old Czech.
</li><ol><li>so I could tag Beowulf with 'ang' only.</li><li>and there is no valid current code for tagging for <span>Smil Flaška z Pardubic</span></li><li>A request for BCP 47 variant tags for Shakespearean English (en-SHAKESPR) would be legitimate
</li><li>A request for a registered old Czech language tag (oldczech) would be legitimate. <span>(However "primary languages are strongly RECOMMENDED for registration with ISO 639, and proposals rejected by ISO 639/RA will be closely scrutinized before they are registered with IANA."
</span>)<br></li></ol></ol>I don't think they are using model number one, but we need to find out.<br><br>Mark<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/15/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Anthony Aristar</b> <<a href="mailto:aristar@linguistlist.org">
aristar@linguistlist.org</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;">With all due respect, this seems like a very odd discussion from my
<br>perspective as a linguistics professor. The discussion seems to<br>presuppose that all that matters is whether Microsoft is going to one<br>day produce a version of Word in Middle High German or Old English, or<br>how many texts exist in a language.
<br><br>But the ISO 639 codes are used for much more than this. In particular,<br>they are used to ensure interoperability, allowing material of the same<br>linguistic nature to be found in searches, and to be compared using the
<br>linguistic ontologies that are now being developed. If I am a scholar<br>searching for texts in Old English (or Old High German, for that<br>matter) and everyone has been cavalier enough to code such material<br>with eng and deu, what the search engines return will be utterly
<br>useless to me. I am going to be flooded with such a quantity of<br>material in Modern English and Modern German that searching through it<br>will be essentially impossible.<br><br>So if you really believe that it doesn't matter if you code English
<br>material as eng, whatever its period, what you're really saying is that<br>you don't really care about interoperability, and that you don't really<br>care about scholarship.<br><br> **************************************
<br>Anthony Aristar, Director, Institute for Language Information & Technology<br> Professor of Linguistics<br>Moderator, LINGUIST Principal Investigator, EMELD Project<br>Linguistics Program
<br>Dept. of English <a href="mailto:aristar@linguistlist.org">aristar@linguistlist.org</a><br>Eastern Michigan University 2000 Huron River Dr, Suite 104<br>Ypsilanti, MI 48197<br>U.S.A.<br><br>
URL: <a href="http://linguistlist.org/aristar/">http://linguistlist.org/aristar/</a><br> **************************************<br><br>> 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><br><br><br><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