Subject: Re: [Ltru] Consensus call: extlang

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 19:01:28 -0600

Randy Presuhn <randy underscore presuhn at mindspring dot com> wrote:

> It must be crystal clear that 'zh' does NOT mean Mandarin, but rather 
> any kind of Chinese.  Of course, there are cases where one might 
> deliberately be imprecise in tagging, but we should not be so sloppy 
> in our own definitions to equate the label for the superset with the 
> subset, just as we must avoid falsely limiting 'de' to "Standard 
> German" or 'ar' to "Standard Arabic".

We should decide whether this is the general sense of the working group, 
or if it's more along the lines of "Tagging non-Mandarin Chinese with 
'zh' is comparable to walking through dangerous neighborhoods in the 
middle of the night, blindfolded, with $100 bills pinned to one's body."

--
Doug Ewell  *  Arvada, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

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From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 20:18:15 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Doug Ewell

> middle of the night, blindfolded, with $100 bills pinned to one's

Whether or not it is so risky depends on the scenario. There are some scenarios in which it may be completely unproblematic to tag content in either Mandarin or Cantonese as "zh". Librarians do the ISO 639-2 equivalent of that all the time, for example. There may also be applications in which there would certain risks in tagging Cantonese content as "zh", and in principle there may also be applications in which tagging Mandarin content as "zh" might present risks.

"zh" means "Chinese"; not Mandarin, not Cantonese.

Know the requirements of your application scenarios; tag wisely.

Peter