RE: what is Latn?

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 13:06:07 CDT

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    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
    On Behalf
    > Of JFC (Jefsey) Morfin

    > At 22:22 16/05/2005, Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > >If something is wrong here, there's something not documented in
    ISO15924
    > >(the list of characters that are considered part of the script).
    >
    > Thank you for this. This is the very point I need to "debug" for
    several
    > months. A human being can more or less understand "Latn". A computer
    needs
    > a charset.

    This seems to me to be about as obvious as saying that ISO 3166 is
    faulty because it's not documented with a set of geospatial vectors
    defining the physical extent of countries, and that ISO 639 is faulty
    because it doesn't document all of the utterances/texts that make up a
    language.

    Certainly when it comes to creating implementations you need to know
    what characters are considered "Latn", but the fact that ISO 15924 does
    not document that does not entail that ISO 15924 is inadequate for its
    purpose. In the same way, anybody implementing linguistic processing for
    some given language needs to know about valid utterances/texts of that
    language, but the fact that ISO 639 doesn't document those doesn't mean
    it needs debugging. People find detailed information about particular
    languages from sources other than ISO 639; similarly, people can find
    details about what characters are associated with "Latn" from sources
    other than ISO 15924. As has been mentioned, Unicode happens to provide
    information that accomplishes that.

    There is *no* need for charsets (using that term in its specific IT i18n
    meaning as a standardized coded character set than can be used in
    interchange) to accomplish this.

    > 5. this way when we quote the tag, we quote the locale. When we have
    the
    > locale we have all the information you call for (provided the way to
    to
    > draw letters, but also icones, etc. is included in the locale).

    Nobody has *ever* said that a locale tag gives you everything you ever
    needed to know to implement support for a locale. It simply functions as
    a metadata ID for a given data category; the rich content of that
    category is defined separately.

    Peter Constable



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