"Century" variants (was: Re: What to do with Gaulish ?)
Gerard Meijssen
gerardm at wiktionaryz.org
Tue Nov 21 15:40:29 CET 2006
Hoi,
What we discuss is what language something is. A reworked version of
Voltaire or Rouseau is not the work the man wrote, it is modern French.
What a tag should indicate is the language used and not what is being
said or who it is attributed to. I do think the IETF is involved in
describing what a particular content technically is.
An adaptation is as different from the original as a translation would
be, it is derived from a different era, in many ways a different culture.
Thanks,
Gerard
CE Whitehead schreef:
> Hi, thanks, I will fill out the forms as I do think someone looking
> for Voltaire or Rousseau will specify Voltaire or Rouseau.
> In addition, Middle French is not that far from 17th century; someone
> looking for 17th century French might want both.
> So I am particularly interested in the subtags for the 16thc and 17thc.
>
> When the tag indicates the date, the user would then not go to the
> pages he/she did not want, but I feel with literature the only problem
> would be when someone wanted 16th century French translated into
> Modern French (and it is normally not translated, unlike Old French,
> which often is available in Modern French; correct me if I'm wrong here.)
> Thanks.
>
> --C. E. Whitehead
>
>
>> From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell at adelphia.net>
>>
>> CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:
>>
>>> Of course, an ordinary user looking for a French text might not want
>>> Middle or Old French. Middle French would be readable probably to
>>> the ordinary user, though different from Modern French. The
>>> documents would be literary anyway and should not interest the
>>> ordinary user and probably would not come up in a search for
>>> business and shopping; they would come up in a search for French
>>> literature. Only in a search for French literature I would think
>>> (hopefully, if the search engine works, if no one has put all kinds
>>> of fictitious stuff in the meta content information).
>>
>> Even scholars of French literature, looking for (say) Voltaire or
>> Rousseau, may not necessarily want to pull up works in Old or Middle
>> French such as the chansons de geste. The scholar who will accept
>> material in any of the three languages, like the businessman who will
>> accept English or French or Japanese, needs to specify this
>> preference explicitly.
>>
>>> In addition, should the pages come up, the second part of the tag
>>> indicates the date of the language.
>>
>> Here you are talking about the suggested "12thc" variant subtags, not
>> the ISO 639-based subtags "fr" and "frm" and "fro".
>>
>> I stand by the caveats I mentioned about the arbitrariness of tagging
>> language as "12th century."
>>
>>> If your pages are inserted into the body of a page created by the
>>> host's application, there is no place to list more than one language
>>> at a time; you can of course list different text processing
>>> languages in the various subsections delineated by html or xml or
>>> xhtml (such as p for paragraph, div for division, span for still
>>> another section heading); but only one at a time.
>>
>> Yes, that is how it is done with existing technologies. Most text,
>> even multilingual text, is in only one language *at a time*. For
>> text that is truly in multiple languages simultaneously, such as "she
>> has a certain je ne sais quoi about her," the solution is for the
>> language-tagging structure of the text format -- HTML or PDF or
>> proprietary word processor or whatever -- to allow multiple language
>> tags, NOT for a single language tag to represent more than one language.
>>
>>> There is no way to identify a single language as both fr, French,
>>> and frm, Middle French.
>>
>> I assume you mean "identify a single text."
>>
>>> I'd like to say further that the option of having tags for say the
>>> European languages labelled: 12thc, 13thc, 14thc, 15thc, 16thc,
>>> 17thc would help those who needed to clarify the exact date of a
>>> language or language variant.
>>>
>>> I feel these would be useful tags!
>>
>> Then go ahead and fill out the necessary forms from RFC 4646 and send
>> them to this list.
>>
>> --
>> Doug Ewell * Fullerton, California, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14
>> http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
>> http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
>> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages
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