Azeri [Re: LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM]
Peter_Constable at sil.org
Peter_Constable at sil.org
Tue Apr 15 10:04:26 CEST 2003
John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com> wrote on 04/15/2003 08:40:48 AM:
> > It can't mean something ambiguous and subject to significant change,
such
> > as "official current use".
>
> That's vague, not ambiguous. "En" is vague, because it means "some kind
of
> English or other", but if that's all you can say, then that's all you
can say.
> The price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity.
I'm concerned about ambiguity, not vagueness. I agree that vagueness is
something we allow for. But, suppose at some point in time "Azerbaijani"
becomes an official language of more than one state, but that there are
differences in these two states (dialectal, or perhaps one uses Latin and
the other Cyrillic or Arabic). Or, suppose that official use in a given
state changes suddenly, e.g. a wholesale abandonment of Latin for
Armenian. In such situations, "official current use" would become
ambiguous -- it would mean *different* things according to different
contexts. The vague denotation, "Azeri in general" is not subject to such
problems.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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