Phonetic orthographies
Eric Muller
emuller at adobe.com
Wed Nov 22 08:25:41 CET 2006
Doug Ewell wrote:
> I hear the following two lines of argument:
> [...]
>
3. In the context of (written) language identification, we don't really
care about scripts per se, we care about orthographies. It is true that
for those languages where there are multiple orthographies we care to
distinguish, it is often the case that each orthography uses a different
script (Mongolian in Cyrillic vs. Mongolian in Mongolian vs. Mongolian
in Latin), so scripts look like the "primary" attribute. But that is
just an illusion; witness the fact that pretty soon we are forced to
treat as separate scripts Hans and Hant to maintain that illusion (no to
mention that there is no way to account, using scripts, for the two
modern written forms of modern Greek).
Rather than fight about what a script is (Mark), or equivalently what
ISO 15924 is about (Ken), and since the world of language tags is
isolated of other standards via its registry anyway, why not just say
that the four-chars subtags are orthographies and be done with it? That
does not preclude to use (and reuse) the subtag "Latn" as a convenient
name for those situations where there is just one (or a single dominant)
orthography that uses the Latin script.
Eric.
More information about the Ietf-languages
mailing list