Unilingua
Michael Everson
everson at evertype.com
Sat Sep 17 11:33:40 CEST 2005
At 00:20 -0700 2005-09-16, Tex Texin wrote:
>Why do we want to register things that have no practical use or
>significance, for which there are almost no documents to give the
>tag to, and yet make our software tables larger and require more
>time to explain what it represents than the value of recognizing the
>code?
Minority languages have practical use and significance, and 639-3
handles all of them. There aren't many conlangs, and I can't see any
harm in supporting them with language codes.
>Isn't it ok to have some number of documents for which we say, yes
>the contents are in a language which isn't covered by tags, so if
>you want a
>description it needs to be annotated in some other way.
I don't think it's OK, no.
>We should reel the registry back into being something that internet
>engineers need for practical internet applications and have some
>form of 80/20 rule related to language categorization.
Internet engineers are having to be dragged kicking and screaming
into IDN support, now aren't they? Sorry, Tex, but I think it's right
that resources are made available for support of
>I recognize the needs of
>linguists to distinguish languages with subtle but important differences,
>but I don't see that general software or internet applications should be
>burdened with the overhead.
Real people speak minority languages, and wish them to be supported
on computers. Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search? Google
still doesn't allow searches in Irish, never mind kiSwahili or
Bambara.
>This has all got to fit in my watch someday. The registry should not
>be a museum for every possible variant that ever existed or was
>postulated.
Unilingua isn't a variant, is it?.
>Maybe in addition to 50 documents to register a tag we should
>require there be 50 engineers that testify they care to recognize
>the distinction. (kidding, but only slightly...)
This isn't funny.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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