Subject: [Ltru] Re: ISO/IEC 10646 and ISO/IEC 14651 freely available

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:06:36 +0200

On the ietf-languages mailing list, I learned that some ISO standards
are available online:

http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

One which is interesting to us is 5218 "Codes for the representation
of human sexes" which normalizes:

Data elements  Code
Not known      0 (zero)
Male           1 (one)
Female         2 (two)
Not applicable 9 (nine)

It is a shame we cannot encode this information in language tags. I
suggest, for RFC 4646bis to add:

   sex        = 1DIGIT                 ; ISO 5218 code

so we accept fr-1 to mean "french spoken by a man" or zh-2 (chinese as
spoken by a woman).

It is strange that Jefsey Morfin did not propose this already.

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 01:46:01 +0200

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
 
> fr-1 to mean "french spoken by a man" or zh-2 (chinese as
> spoken by a woman).

That could get extension "s", extension "l" is for locations,
en-scouse-l-airport = "Scouse as spoken on airports".  Joke
off, no issue, 4646 requires "IETF consensus" for extensions.

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:39:20 +0200

[Still off-topic but interesting]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 01:46:01AM +0200,
 Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 9 lines which said:

> en-scouse-l-airport = "Scouse as spoken on airports".

It seems that, for some languages and cultures, there *is* a
difference between the language spoken by the men and the one spoken
by the women (see
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_subject.asp?code=WSP).

I'm not aware of differences in speech depending on the location.

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From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:48:23 -0400

> I'm not aware of differences in speech depending on the location.

People do talk differently at home, at the workplace, and in church,
but I don't think the issue rises to the level of language tagging yet.
If someone needed this information (as for tagging a multilingual
speech corpus), either -x- or a registered extension would be appropriate.

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]   http://ccil.org/~cowan
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