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

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 17:42:31 -0400

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.  This is off-topic,
as it doesn't contribute to the document any, but the right people to
discuss it are on this list.

Ethnologue provides information on which languages are spoken in which
countries, not necessarily 100% reliable, of course, and assigns a
single "home country" for each language (UK for English, e.g.).  Still,
it would be more than annoying to pick "US" from a country list, and
then scroll through 238 language subtags for languages spoken there,
not even counting immigrant languages!  (English is indeed one of them.)

I think an exchange of ideas would be useful.  Ethnologue and ISO
639-6 also provide language classification information that might also
be useful, though only a small fraction of people who use English would
think of it as "Germanic" or "Indo-European".

-- 
John Cowan  [email-masked]  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic
realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers,
philologists, psychologists, biologists and neurologists, along with
whatever blood can be got out of grammarians. - Russ Rymer

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From: "Debbie Garside" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 23:10:39 +0100

> 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.  This is off-topic, as it doesn't contribute to the 
> document any, but the right people to discuss it are on this list.

A pick list is required...
> 
> Ethnologue provides information on which languages are spoken 
> in which countries, not necessarily 100% reliable, of course, 
> and assigns a single "home country" for each language (UK for 
> English, e.g.).  Still, it would be more than annoying to 
> pick "US" from a country list, and then scroll through 238 
> language subtags for languages spoken there, not even 
> counting immigrant languages!  (English is indeed one of them.)

Based on regions and/or...
> 639-6 also provide language classification information that 
> might also be useful, though only a small fraction of people 
> who use English would think of it as "Germanic" or "Indo-European".

Language classification...

Otherwise known as... a faceted approach!

Debbie

> Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in 
> the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, 
> theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, 
> biologists and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be 
> got out of grammarians. - Russ Rymer
>

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From: "Mark Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 15:54:19 -0700

This is a good topic. A very useful technical is to make the common choices
the easiest. I'd guess having the top X languages in a pulldown, and an
Other... choice.

The Other... can then go to a full-fledged dialog box, with more choices. I
think your idea of selecting by regions would be useful; again listing the
top languages first for each country, probably with an Other... to get the
long tails, the languages spoken by a small percentage of people. (Of
course, even a list of 200+ regions is a pain to navigate, so maybe
organizing them by UN macroregion would be useful.)

So what do I mean by "top"? If you have lots of users with known language
choices, then that information can be used to get a list covering the most
common choices based on available data. In the absence of that, other
rankings can be made based on the kind of application you are looking at,
such as a ranking of languages by population, or by population * average
GDP, perhaps also skewed by target markets. That is, if you're targetting
Eastern Europe, then you'd weigh the top list differently than if your
principal markets were in Latin America. (By 'market' I'm speaking in a
broad, not necessarily commercial, sense.)

I strongly suspect that using a linguistic analysis in a UI would be
pointless and counterproductive, since the average person would be
unfamiliar with such classifications

Debbie, I didn't understand your comment about facets.

Mark

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From: "Debbie Garside" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 01:57:13 +0100

> Debbie, I didn't understand your comment about facets. 
 
A faceted approach is more or less what you have described... various ways
of accessing the data e.g. by region, language, language family, population,
script, anglonym, franconym etc.   But you choose the facet that is most
relevant to your search.  Thus if you know your language is spoken in the US
you choose a pick list based on region and/or region collections.  Or, if
you know the language you require is part of say Western Germanic, choose to
generate the pick list by language family. With ISO 639-6 you will be able
to further refine pick lists according to whether the language you are
searching for is written or spoken or, maybe, transliterated.  I would want
to do parameter queries with wild cards as well.  Thus if I wanted the tag
for Romanized Southern Pashto... The question is can I remember whether it
is Pakhtu or Pashto or even Pashtu (and any number of other
transliterations/spellings - although ISO 639-3 lists them all as Pashto+).
Within ISO 639-6 I can go into the data via the Mode facet, select written
from the pick list (currently 5 options) and enter "Pa* Southern" or even
"PA* South*" in the Language Reference Name Box. 
 
I think data presented by region/region collection/population will be very
useful. But I don't think any application designed to present this data
should be limited in design by rigid facets if alternatives are available. 
 
I have to say in looking at the Ethnologue data now... I have become totally
confused... I was looking at the data alphabetically and searching for Dari
as spoken in Afghanistan... I couldn't find it.  It was listed under Eastern
Farsi!  But there is another, totally unrelated, Dari (Zoroastrian).  Now,
supposedly, I knew what I was looking for. The Region facet may have helped
here, but only if you know that Dari is related to Farsi.
 
The problems are not just in navigating around 7,000+ languages, but also
guessing the chosen language name; which is not, necessarily, obvious.  And
this was just searching for an anglonym... you can, most likely double that
problem with franconyms.  In order to navigate this list properly,
alternative reference names will be required.
 
Sorry for waffling
 
Best regards
 
Debbie

 

  _____  

From: Mark Davis [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 02 October 2006 23:54
To: John Cowan
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Ltru] OT: Managing the big list of subtags

Mark

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From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:40:30 +0900

Just brainstorming:

I think a multifaceted approach, as Debbie has described it, is
very useful. But integrating all this into an interface in an
application is close to overkill. I think a pointer to a Web
site providing the same would be much more useful.
That should be combined with confirmation information
(name/region where spoken, languages with similar names
that are different,...) when entering the code.

Regards,    Martin.

>think of it as "Germanic" or "Indo-European".

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[email-masked]