Re: Flags and Language icons (was: Re: Official ISO 3166

From: Alain LaBonté  (alb@iquebec.com)
Date: Wed Dec 01 1999 - 16:42:25 EST


À 13:10 99-12-01 -0800, John Hudson a écrit :
>I quite like the 'little portraits of famous poets' idea, but who is the
>most renowned Esperanto poet? And would you recognise his picture?

I had forgotten to say that I also liked the idea, the problem being to
recognize 6000 individuals, and some languages not having a highly
recognized icon (what about Wendat [Huron] or Innu [Montagnais]?). For a
limited area though, and for widely known poets or writers, I guess that
the idea is quite sympathetic indeed, and very human. Marco had a good
idea, excellent indeed in certain contexts.

But who said anyway that an appealing icon, which is in the artistic
domain, needs to be standardized? The language code is a good idea for
cataloguing purposes, and the name of a language in that language in
universal characters, is probably the best of ideas for use in a user
interface. Icons can be used as long as they are understood by the speakers
involved.

Btw, in ISO/IEC SC35 (the current JTC1 group involved in icons) Canada
already preached many years ago (at the time SC35 was SC18/WG9) for an
iconic grammar (with layers dealing from international use at the higher
layer through local, via national layers), but the idea was not retained at
the time, probably because the world was not ready. This was much before
the WWW existed. The author of this idea was Michel Cartier, from «
Université du Québec à Montréal» (UQAM).

Alain LaBonté
Québec
 
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