- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 17:54:31 +0100
- To: www-international@w3.org
Hi, During a discussion on using "natural language" or "human language" in the context of WCAG, I noticed that W3C I18N documents use either "natural language" or just "language" [1]. For many linguists, "natural language" has a relatively well-defined meaning: a natural langage is one that has native speakers. I don't think that the I18N documents are meant to apply only to languages with native speakers and exclude or ignore artificially created human langages ("constructed languages" [1]) such as Esperanto, Volapük, or Interlingua. On the other hand, I see no evidence that they also apply to computer languages such as Fortran or Python, so I assume these are not meant to be covered. So I wonder if the term "human language" would be more appropriate in those documents. (I apologize in advance if this issue has been discussed and resolved before; a Google search in the archives did not bring up relevant threads). [1] Examples * The following use the term "natural language": - Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Languages in XHTML & HTML Content <http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/>; - Tutorial: Creating (X)HTML Pages in Arabic & Hebrew <http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/> (but only once at the end of the document); - Best Practices for XML Internationalization <http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/> (just once); - W3C I18N FAQ: Why use the language attribute? <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-why>; - W3C I18N FAQ: Two-letter or three-letter language codes <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-2or3>. * The following just use "language", not "natural language" or "human language": - Ruby Annotation <http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/>; - Unicode in XML and Other Markup Languages <http://www.w3.org/TR/unicode-xml/>; - Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Handling Bidirectional Text 1.0 <http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/>; - Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Characters and Encodings 1.0 <http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-char/>; - FAQ: Monolingual vs. multilingual Web sites <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-mono-multilingual>; - Setting the HTTP charset parameter <http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTTP-charset>; - FAQ: Multilingual Forms <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-forms-utf-8>; - FAQ: Non-English tags <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-non-eng-tags>; - FAQ: HTTP and meta for language information <http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-http-and-lang>; - Language tags in HTML and XML <http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php>. Of course, this is just a sample, not an exhaustive list. (A Google search for "human language" in http://www.w3.org/International/ returns exactly three results.) Best regards, Christophe -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Monday, 12 February 2007 16:54:38 UTC