Spanglish

Luc Pardon lucp at skopos.be
Fri Jan 6 22:31:02 CET 2017



On 06-01-17 21:29, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:32 AM, Luc Pardon <lucp at skopos.be
> <mailto:lucp at skopos.be>> wrote:
> 
>      If I have a text in the Greek language, I can write that down with
>     Greek characters, or I can transliterate it into Latin, or Russian, or
>     whatever. The language remains exactly the same Greek, written by the
>     same writer.
> 
> 
> Absolutely, but the script is a bigger barrier to mutual intelligibility
> than
> anything except the language itself.  I can read English in Latin script
> with ease, in Greek or Cyrillic or IPA with difficulty, in Arabic or
> Devanagari
> not at all.

   Agreed, but I never said that script was irrelevant. My point was
simply that - with hindsight - it would have been better to provide
separate fields with appropriate names, i.e. "lang=en script=Latn"
instead of "lang=en-Latn".

  The way it it is now is equivalent to building a customer database
with a single field called "name", and then lumping all the relevant
infp about the customer (birth date, gender, e-mail) into that single
"name" field, glue it all together with hyphens, and define an elaborate
parsing algorithm to take it all apart again.

   Luc


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list