Language for taxonomic names, redux

[Mark Davis ☕️]

> The logistics of how many people will start using it when and for what
are a bit overrated, in my opinion. If something has merit as a
distinguisher, it has merit whether one person uses it or a million.

The variant tags are designed for *variants of languages*, but even there
there are limits. For some people, en-US-pinpenmg for "the variant of US
English that uses the pin-pen merger
<http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/07/pronunciation-0>" has merit
to at least one person, but that kind of fine-grained usage for the variant
subtags would devolve into chaos.

And it is even goofier if you are not limited to *variants of languages*,
but rather open it up to any category that someone, somewhere, thinks has
merit. Pretty soon someone is wanting to tag technical terms used in dog
breeding, and so on. Or tagging parts of speech: 'adjectiv', ... Or
inflections: 'ergative', ...

Mark

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 4:21 PM, Arthur Reutenauer <
arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> wrote:

> > http://www.galeriainfo.hu/index1.php?link=muveszeink&muvesz_id=174 when
> autotranslated by Google translates “Hosszú György” as “George Long”.
> Clearly that’s not desirable (even if from one point of view it might be
> “accurate") — but there’s no way to use language tagging to achieve
> “protection” of the personal name, is there?
>
>   I also thought of personal names, because that’s the closest analogy I
> could think of to binomial names.  Clearly someone requesting a subtag
> for personal names would have to make a very strong case indeed.
>
>   That said, binomial names are in a way more generic (pun intended)
> than personal names, so it’s obviously not exactly the same either.
>
>         Best,
>
>                 Arthur
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