Re: Language identifier proposals request

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Sep 03 1995 - 01:09:06 EDT


You wrote:
>
>Asmus, thanks for the description.
>
>What was going to be our proposal to the UTC will now simply be
>submitted to the mailing list after an internal review. Rick McGowan
>kindly reminded me that language identification is not really within
>the scope of the Unicode Standard.

There is growing recognition that there are subjects closely related to
the subject matter of the Unicod Standard proper, for which a work-item
in the UTC would meet the interest of the membership. Let me make clear
that Unicode will consider these situations carefully, but is open to
proposals resulting in new work items. In case of lanuguage
identifiers, this discussion keeps re-surfacing and therefore it might
well become appropriate to consider some form of Unicode publication,
perhaps a technical report. For this matter to make progress you would
need to find support in the membership as well as find one or more
volunteers to do the technical work in between meetings. One thing I
could see as useful would be to publish a survey of existing schemes
along with any new proposal meeting the demands I outlined in my last
mail. Your mailing has generated some responses already that might be
useful.

A./

PS: were you planning to attend the Unicode Conference?
>
> [elided]
>
> Asmus> To summarize: Any proposal needs to address these issues
>
> Asmus> - how the ID is designed (numeric, string, etc.)
> Asmus> - how one can tell from the id that 2 languages are
substitutable
> Asmus> - how the ID is incorportated into a data stream (default
> Asmus> protocol)
> Asmus> - suggested initial assignments of ID values
>
>Our approach details three of the four points you mentioned above,
>but doesn't really discuss "substitutability" per se. That kind of
>information can easily be encoded in our approach.
>
>I can see the neccessity of "substitutablility"; particularly in the
>context of many commercial systems that provide language support in
>modular form.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
------
>mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu
>Mark Leisher "The trick is not gaining the
knowledge,
>Computing Research Lab but surviving the lessons."
>New Mexico State University -- "Svaha," Charles de
Lint
>Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL
>Las Cruces, NM 88003
>



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