- From: Elizabeth J. Pyatt <ejp10@psu.edu>
- Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:08:29 -0500
- To: "A. Vine" <andrea.vine@sun.com>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org
A. Vine wrote > >>But now you are talking about differences in a script, not >>differences in a language. > >Um, when you're talking about the written word, they are somewhat inseparable. I disagree on this point. There are Central Asian languages (e.g. Uzbek) which can be written in three scripts (Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic), yet they are not called different languages. I realize that there are cases of similar spoken forms being labelled as different languages because they are written in different scripts, but that is more a matter of politics than of linguistics. I concede that the encoding tag is not enough to specify the script, but I would consider script to be a third meta tag. (i.e. ISO-15924 - http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html) I see that using Chinese-TW is NOT recommended, and I am glad to see that. I also see why "zh" would not be helpful in of itself as it is currently defined. I was assuming a definition of "zh" as the written form used in Chinese dialect communities, but that does not appear to be the correct definition. It would not be Mandarin Chinese because it can be read all over the country by speakers of the different dialects. It's almost like a data set of numeric text which could be read in almost any language. 1 2 3 =uno,dos,tres? =one,two,three? What kind of language tag would a set of numbers be? "Math"? Would it have no tag and assume a user agent will use the default language (whatever it is). I assume that a speech synthesizer agent would treat Chinese characters as if it were Mandarin Chinese and pronounce it accordingly, but you could build several agents that could read them in the other forms (Hakka, Cantonese) I would argue that if you're speaking of pin yin Romanization, it might be important to specify that it is the Mandarin form because now phonetic form is represented. The Romanized form of Cantonese would be different. 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 Wednesday, 15 December 2004 14:29:58 UTC