Re: Areas (3): Country lists

On 11/10/2001 05:11:14 AM www-international-request wrote:


>To resolve this situation an idea could be to concurrently develop a list 
of
>code for *referencials* so all the different standards could live under 
one
>roof.
>
>The code could be:
>01 - Geographical
>02 - Political
>03 - ...
>
>and why not:
>15289 - World as Company X views it (so we can create mapping tables for 
all
>the legacy locales).

John: This discussion reminds me of something that someone mentioned at 
the WG1 meeting. I think the fellow's name was Jake Peters -- he was the 
chap who was representing another SC from some other TC and was wanting to 
create a liaison. He referred to some standard for registered domains of 
application; I forget the standard number (it would be on some notes back 
at the office, but right now I'm about 6 miles over Georgia). The thing 
that particularly caught my attention with regard to that standard was the 
point later in the day when the same fellow indicated that he'd like a 639 
code for "ISO English" -- clearly not a language but rather a language as 
used in a particular domain. Not unlike a locale.

It struck right at that point that "locales" and similar categories that 
get identified in terms of language-country pairs should perhaps really be 
identified in terms of languge-domain pairs; or maybe not necessarily as 
pairs (in view of comments on this thread), but replace "country" by the 
more generic "domain". That could easily solve the problem people have 
faced with regard to a need to refer to "Spanish-Latin America".

In other words, I think we need identifiers for more than just regions; we 
need identifiers for domains, which may be geographic regions, but may 
also be a particular government, a particular company, or whatever.


- Peter


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>

Received on Saturday, 10 November 2001 22:52:09 UTC