- From: Elizabeth J. Pyatt <ejp10@psu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 14:46:45 -0500
- To: www-international@w3.org
There are many ways to define different variants depending on how specific you want to get. As others have mentioned, there are many spoken varieties for each language used, but it may not be necessary to define them UNLESS you are archiving content for linguistic analysis. As I have said before, I would focus on written forms used. I would further stick to written forms used for business and professional purposes AT THIS STAGE. I suspect most internationalization will be focusing on translation of legal, news and marketing material and these are usually done in the standard languages. I originally questioned en-PR because most commercial English used in Puerto Rico will be standard en-US with perhaphs a few vocabulary items and idioms which are different. In my interactions with citizens from Puerto Rico, the focus in learning to read and write standard en-US, even if the spoken form has a different phonology (i.e. an accent). Another side issue is if you want to distinguish regional variations on regional vocabulary alone or whether further grammatical differences in the standard language would be required for it to be a variant. Again, places like Guam and Puerto Rico may have unique vocabulary items, but so do New York, Boston, New Orleans, etc. Also many professions will have a specialized lexicon. One interesting approach could be to find "regional" writing manuals and use them as a basis. Do people in the Falklands use the UK style manual or do they have one of their own? Do students assume they are learning UK English or something else in school? The territories are the places I would check the most before assigning a regional varient code. Chinese is kind of an unusual case, but I think the other languages could be handled with such an algorithm. There would only be one written Japanese recognized with the option for specifying additional spoken Japanese forms for dialectlogists and linguists. Latin American Spanish tends to have one grammar versus Castillian Spanish even though several countries are involved. It's not that I don't want to ever define all the spoken forms, but it will require more of an effort than I think this project was designed for. Elizabeth Pyatt -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. Instructional Designer Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS Penn State University ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office) 210 Rider Building II 227 W. Beaver Avenue State College, PA 16801-4819 http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu http://tlt.psu.edu
Received on Thursday, 16 December 2004 19:47:07 UTC