RE: Article for wide review: Choosing a language tag

Hi.
From: Phillips, Addison>
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 18:27:20 -0700
>"For setting the preferences on your web browser, you probably want to use ranges
> that start with 'zh' if you prefer content in Chinese, instead of adopting tags
> starting with the subtag 'cmn', even though Mandarin Chinese is the most common
> form, possibly adding ranges beginning with 'yue' if you also prefer to receive
> Cantonese content. Similarly, you would tag your blog with tags like "zh-Hans-CN"
> or "zh-Hant-TW"."
Yes to the above; however I think you mean "content in written Chinese" (and of course largely in the Chinese script, rather than Romanized Chinese, which could be tagged with 'cmn,' since it is generally Mandarin Chinese that is Romanized--for persons not from China studying Chinese??).
Similarly [ar] is used to indicate content in written Arabic, which is the standardized form, appropriate for most written content (that is most written content in Arabic is not localized for a particular dialect--the exception of course may be songs--in spite of the comments on it provided by Richard Ishida's
search utility:
http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/index.php?find=Arabic&submit=Find&lookup=&list=0&check=);
see:
http://knol.google.com/k/hussein-maxos/problems-of-spoken-written-arabic/3me2c8ayno8so/1#
For a very good summary of the issues as far as Arabic goes! (This is not however a thorough treatment of all dialectical differences--perhaps because vowel diacritics are not often written in Arabic, Mr./Dr. Maxos seems to have ignored the differences in the pronunciation of vowel sounds that accompany the differences in the pronunciation of the consonants across the dialects.)

Best,

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com 		 	   		  

Received on Monday, 12 October 2009 18:52:29 UTC