Subject: [Ltru] Re: OT: Managing the big list of subtags

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 00:05:00 -0700

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> How are we going to offer people a choice of language subtags in the 
> RFC 4646bis regime?  A simple dropdown list is barely usable for RFC 
> 4646, and definitely isn't going to cut it for 4646bis.

It's all I've got in my application.  I agree that an alphabetical list 
of 7,000 items isn't the most efficient way to look up this sort of 
information, but I couldn't think of anything better offhand and nothing 
was handed to me on a silver platter.  Regional categorization may not 
be worth much; I hear Vietnamese every day at work and I am 8,000 miles 
from Vietnam.

For ISO 639-6 it will be quite a bit different, because that data will 
apparently be organized in a hierarchical fashion, with each code 
element listed with its "parent."  That practically begs for a tree-view 
control.  But John is also right that not everyone who uses this data 
will think like a linguist and associate "English" with "Germanic" or 
"Indo-European."  The problem is how to define "meaningful" categories, 
however one chooses to define that.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:23:56 +0200

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:05:00AM -0700,
 Doug Ewell <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 32 lines which said:

> I agree that an alphabetical list of 7,000 items isn't the most
> efficient way to look up this sort of information, but I couldn't
> think of anything better offhand and nothing was handed to me on a
> silver platter.

This is indeed very offtopic (it is an UI issue and every interface
which allows a language choice already tackled it) and I suggest to
focalize on what LTRU can do to help the UI designers. Not to do their
jobs but to provide them with information which *may* be useful.

For instance, providing a Description is useful: the UI may allow the
user to *type* a language name and then fuzzy-search it in
descriptions. Not every UI will do so but we provide the data, just in
case.

Providing categories as in ISO 639-6 is useful: I agree that not
everyone thinks like a linguist but we (LTRU) do not care. We provide
information, UI designers use it is they see fit.

> Regional categorization may not be worth much; I hear Vietnamese
> every day at work and I am 8,000 miles from Vietnam.

Bad example because your co-workers probably think of Vietnamese as a
"foreign" language in the country where they work. I hear Arabic every
day at work but my neighbors will not be surprised if Arabic is not
listed if they choose France for their location.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 07:06:24 -0700

> jobs but to provide them with information which *may* be useful.

I wouldn't go so far as "very" off-topic.  User interface issues may be 
relevant to some implementers of language tags.

One of the points we have tried to make is that the Description fields 
in the Registry are just identifiers, not normative names, and it is 
perfectly OK for an application to translate or otherwise modify the 
names as long as they mean the same thing.  For example, an application 
might choose "North Korea" and "South Korea" instead of the official 
names we got from ISO.

John's question about how to organize 7,200 data items, or even 500, in 
a user-comprehensible way falls into this category also.

> listed if they choose France for their location.

The whole realm of "foreign language" is a bit fuzzy, and subject to 
change over time.  Spanish is spoken by over 7% of the U.S. population 
and is an official language of the state of New Mexico.  Here in 
Southern California we have voter materials in Spanish, Chinese, 
Vietnamese, and Korean.

My point is that categorizing language by region works in the big 
picture, but eventually people will raise questions about fine details, 
and that's where the problems begin.  I'm not saying I have a better 
option.

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:13:07 -0400

Doug Ewell scripsit:

> Regional categorization may not be worth much; I hear Vietnamese every
> day at work and I am 8,000 miles from Vietnam.

The Ethnologue indeed lists Vietnamese as one of the non-native languages
of the U.S., with an estimated 859,000 speakers.  Indeed, it is the
14th most widely spoken language in the U.S., after English, Spanish,
German, Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Portuguese, Eastern Yiddish,
French, Armenian, Italian, and Western Farsi.  (Of these, only English
and Spanish are considered indigenous.)

-- 
Do what you will,                       John Cowan
   this Life's a Fiction                [email-masked]
And is made up of                       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
   Contradiction.  --William Blake