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<p class=MsoNormal>What are people’s thoughts about language tagging for
language-invariant strings?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>I’m working with a group on an application scenario in
which we have a table of strings in various languages that name entities, but
we also need to support entries that have a reference name that is considered a
language-neutral form of a name for a given entity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Strictly speaking, these would be strings intended for
programmatic operation and not human consumption, and so, some might argue, are
not in scope for IETF language tags. However, these are exceptional: almost all
of the strings in the same table are intended for human consumption, and RFC
4646 is the spec being applied for identifying the language of strings in the
table. Moreover, the strings in question *<b>are</b>* (in general) in a human
language; they are just the values that are adopted to be used for language-neutral
referencing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The “i-default” tag is not appropriate for this:
these are not default display strings. And “zxx” is not appropriate
since, in fact, there is linguistic content. The “mis” tag doesn’t
seem like the right choice: we do not want an ambiguous ID that could be
applied to other entries intended for a different purpose (strings intended for
human consumption that happen to be in an uncoded language.) The “und”
tag might be usable, though that doesn’t seem quite right to me: we’re
not intending to say that the language is (as yet) undetermined (and might be
determined later); rather, we want a value indicating ‘this is special
content used as a referential key – the language of the content is
irrelevant’.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>That’s leaving me a bit inclined to think that we
should establish a special-purpose tag for the language-invariant semantic. I’d
submit a request to the ISO 639 JAC (it would be another special-purpose-ID
request as I did for “zxx”.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>What are others thoughts?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Peter<o:p></o:p></p>
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