German as used in Liechtenstein

[JFC (Jefsey) Morfin]

Doug,
I have 7620 languages in the ISO 639-3.5 Draft. I have 42624 locations in 
the UN/LOCODE. I have 33000 French cities in my Web of France reference 
data base and more than 500 listed local language associations I should 
attach to them. The algorithm I use permits to roughly relate them to one 
of the 266 "business areas" considering that such areas are also historical 
and cultural areas. (For the time being I am focusing on European France only).

Who would really want to consider ISO 3166 to define anything else than a 
first level administrative/political grid? This is not a geographic grid 
nor a sociogeographic grid. We cannot compare ST, PT or TF with CN, IN, US, 
RU, UK, DE, FR etc.

IMHO tagging must result from the choice of the granularity of the 
reference dimensions (ISO  639-3, UN/LOCODE - which extends ISO 3166 - 
Unicode - etc.) and from a semantic permitting to support a neuronal use 
(the same as there are macrolanguages, ISO 3166 is a macrosociogeographic 
approach of UN/LOCODE, etc) and information inclusion to permit further 
data mining.

There should be no debate about the German used in Liechtenstein, only an 
existing database entry updated when necessary by a local authoritative 
source. That database (using the reference grid) would be used to compile a 
one shot specialized tagging systems list or to maintain permanent tagging 
semantic webs.

Obviously, this cannot be built one shot today. But this is definitely the 
kind of live reference usage will increasingly need.
But again, this does not delay RFC 3066bis. Just to help preparing RFC 
3066ter, together with many other aspects to discuss.
jfcm


At 08:32 22/12/2004, Doug Ewell wrote:

>JFC (Jefsey) Morfin <jefsey at jefsey dot com> wrote:
>
> > The identification is about "language.country". There are 239 country
> > codes in ISO-3166 and 6000 or so languages in ISO 639, this means that
> > there are 239x6000 tags.
>
>There are 472 language codes in ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2, the only parts
>that currently exist outside of draft form.  So there are "only" 239 ×
>472 = 112,808 syntactically legal language-region tags.
>
>In addition, as Randy Presuhn said, the overwhelming majority of these
>are like Addison and Mark's example of "ale-BE," syntactically legal but
>unlikely to be of any real use.
>
>-Doug Ewell
>  Fullerton, California
>  http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/