The limit of language codes

CE Whitehead cewcathar at hotmail.com
Tue Feb 20 20:07:07 CET 2007


>David Starner wrote:
>
> > What we have to do first? This is not a missionary group. My
> > primary goal is to create a set of language tags usable for
> > Project Gutenberg, for which also having them supported by XML
> > and other people is a great help.
>
>Nice to meet you.  I'm here for the same reason, only Project
>Runeberg instead, http://runeberg.org/
>
> > A large percentage of the books I personally do for Project
> > Gutenberg date back before 1700, whether in modern editions or
> > original facsimiles. That's what I'm most concerned about
> > tagging.
>
>My current opinion, which might change any day, is that simple
>time-less language codes are enough for my current needs.  Even
>though the spelling in 16th century Swedish is quite different
>from today's spelling, the authors, ideas and topics are also very
>different.  In trying to understanding an old text, the spelling
>isn't necessarily the hardest part.  Trying to search or spell
>check that language based on "lang=sv" will often fail.
>Ultimately one could follow the example of German, where de-1901
>and de-1996 now denote the spelling before and after the spelling
>reform of 1996. It is quite easy to identify 3 different language
>variants of Swedish between 1801 and now (because of two major
>spelling reforms in 1889 and 1906), and the same number of Danish.
>But as soon as I start looking at Norwegian, there is a personal
>orthography per writer and decade.  And for Danish and Swedish
>this is true of the situation before 1800.  Trying to identify and
>isolate all such variants doesn't seem to pay off, this would only
>lead to the kind of en-GB-1611-Shakespeare-Stratford absurdities
>(or nb-NO-1870-Ibsen) described in Harald's posting, and so one
>might just as well call the languages by their current names and
>give up on variants.  We also have books where the dialogues are
>written in dialect, that defies any standard orthography, and
>books on highly specialized topics where the terms and phrases are
>not found in standard dictionaries.  sv-1883-chemistry, eh?
>
>Before I'm going to need standardized subtags for Danish, Swedish
>and Norwegian, I first have to find a use for subtags, and then to
>find a need to exchange them in a standardized format.  Even if I
>declare a particular text to be in a certain variant of Swedish,
>neither users nor search engines care much about this.
>
>But if anybody else can see a need for standardized subtags for
>these languages, I'd be interested in taking part in the
>discussion.
>
>By the way, tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of a major spelling
>reform of Norwegian (bokmål, at the time called riksmål).  On
>February 19, 1907, the Norwegian government resolved to change the
>spelling in their official documents.  The rules for "nb-1907" are
>described in http://runeberg.org/rm1907/  However, very few other
>writers used this reform in every detail, and a new major reform
>was introduced in 1917.
>
>--
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Hi, Lars, would
en
(if that were the only subtag available)
be sufficient to tag the English at the following link:

http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html

??
I see that it is useful to tag the historical differences because some 
readers want a modernized text, some do not, as I think Dave Starner has 
pointed out as well.

Thanks.

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar at hotmail.com

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