<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif">Michael is raising valid concerns about the actual application of the tag, which is very different from the number of instances of the words to which that tag could be applied <i>in theory</i>. To take an extreme example, one could apply for a subtag 'astart' to apply to all sequences of Latin letters beginning with 'a'. The number of such sequences is <i>unlimited</i> — not just “100 million or higher” — but it doesn't mean that such a tag would be used — or at all useful — in practice.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif">What would the actual benefit be of having such a tag for biological taxonomics? You write in <a href="http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-February/000574.html">http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2003-February/000574.html</a> says:</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default"><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> There is convention to abbreviate second occurrences of</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> such names:</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> <<a href="http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000047.htm">http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000047.htm</a>></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> thus:</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> "Homo sapiens has a bigger brain that H.</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> erectus"</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> and that the proposed tag (or sub-tag) will potentially</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> allow the second such occurrence to be pronounced in</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> full by speech synthesis software, as it would be in</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> normal speech:</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> "Homo sapiens has a bigger brain that Homo</font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="times new roman, serif"> erectus"</font></div><div style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif">Have any major developers of text-to-speech software come out in favor of this, or is it just a hobbyist speaking? The complexity of TTS is so great anyway, that I can't image that the software challenge of pronouncing "H. erectus" is made any better by this tag.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif">Moreover, the odds that people would in fact tag for this purpose are vanishingly small. I doubt for example the author of <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jennifer-garner-joining-foxs-simon-homo-sapiens-agenda-978267">http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jennifer-garner-joining-foxs-simon-homo-sapiens-agenda-978267</a> would write instead «<font face="times new roman, serif">Jennifer Garner Joining Fox's 'Simon vs. the </font><span xml:lang='xxx'>Homo Sapiens</span> Agenda'» or the author of <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/h-erectus-cut-chewed-way-through-evolution">https://www.sciencenews.org/article/h-erectus-cut-chewed-way-through-evolution</a> would write «<span xml:lang='xxx'>H. erectus</span> cut, chewed way through evolution», just to take two examples off a web search.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"times new roman",serif"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><font face="'times new roman', serif"><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><div></div></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">Mark</div></font><div><div><font face="'times new roman', serif"><i><span style="font-style:normal"><i></i></span><i></i></i></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 12:18 PM, Andy Mabbett <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk" target="_blank">andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">On 21 February 2017 at 23:04, Michael Everson <<a href="mailto:everson@evertype.com">everson@evertype.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
> if a case could be made for this<br>
<br>
</span>"if"?<br>
<span class=""><br>
> So far the one thing this might argue for would be preventing automatic translation<br>
<br>
</span>I've set out several additional use-cases previously, including:<br>
<br>
* Pronunciation by aural browsers/ assistive technologies<br>
* Selection for styling by CSS<br>
<span class=""><br>
> but the thing is so very few of these names would be found in an ordinary dictionary in any language that I don’t know how likely it is that this error occurs<br>
<br>
</span>The number of identified species was estimated, in or before 2011, as<br>
"between 1.4 and 1.8 million". The full number may be 100 million or<br>
higher. That's a lot of words, many of which (such as the genus<br>
"Circus" or the epithets "bicolor", "major" and "minor") have<br>
(another) meaning in one or more languages.<br>
<br>
> <a href="http://www.curioustaxonomy.net/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.curioustaxonomy.<wbr>net/</a><br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-strangest-scientific-names-14139154/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.smithsonianmag.com/<wbr>science-nature/the-worlds-<wbr>strangest-scientific-names-<wbr>14139154/</a><br>
<br>
Please don't be hung up on the amusing examples given by those pages;<br>
they represent a small fraction of the whole set.<br>
<span class="im HOEnZb"><br>
--<br>
Andy Mabbett<br>
@pigsonthewing<br>
<a href="http://pigsonthewing.org.uk" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://pigsonthewing.org.uk</a><br>
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