Re: Including content modes in 4.1

>In the new draft I am considering a couple things. First, is this 
>related at all to our already existing checkpoint on natural 
>language:
>
>>1.4 Identify the primary natural language of text and text 
>>equivalents and all changes in natural language.
>
>I know it is not covered there now, but could it be? How do you 
>indicate vowel marks? Is it through which characters are selected or 
>is it through markup in some way?

Vowel marks and any other characteristic of the writing system are 
irrelevant to the specification of "natural" language. You can write 
Serbo-Croat in Latin or Cyrillic characters; are you saying we have 
to notate that?

Note that dialect differences (most notably Bokmål and Nynorsk in 
Norwegian) are not the same thing, because we are not dealing with 
orthographies in that case. The level of abstraction we are dealing 
with is *language name*, not paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words, 
letters, or phonemes. Then of course the issue of notating sign 
languages comes up (currently impossible with two-language codes; 
they all begin with sgn-).

By the way, it is unwise to continue to refer to human languages as 
"natural" languages, no matter how well-understood that term is among 
the cognoscenti. Why not call them human languages?
-- 
         Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
         Accessibility articles, resources, and critiques:
         <http://joeclark.org/access/>

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2001 16:38:52 UTC