Subject: Re: [Slim] Primary language tags (was "Re: draft-tomkinson comments")

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2015 14:11:50 -0700

Gunnar Hellström wrote:

> But it is a general problem that should best be solved at its source -
> in BCP-47. Spoken and written languages are not identical, we just
> believe so at first thought.

Language tags aren't generally meant to show what is or is not
identical. They're meant to assist searching, filtering, and selection
of tools like spell-checkers and translation engines. Those aren't
usually sensitive to distinctions between spoken and written forms.

> This problem makes language tags ambigous in many applications. Users
> usually want to know if they are supposed to read or listen.

Most language-tagged content is self-evident as to its modality. An
audio recording, for example, is obviously meant to be listened to. A
text file is meant to be read, or otherwise processed as text. Language
tags don't try to state the obvious here.

I suggest joining the ietf-languages list if you feel there are
shortcomings in BCP 47 that need to be addressed, either by registering
new variants or by revising the specification.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸

---

From: Martin J. Dürst <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 09:50:52 +0900

On 2015/11/04 06:11, Doug Ewell wrote:

> identical.

I agree, in the sense that 'identical' is extremely difficult to say for 
languages. There are always minor differences, even when tagged the same.

> They're meant to assist searching, filtering, and selection

Of course searching may be sensitive to the distinction between spoken 
and written form, and same for filtering and selection. And 
spell-checking is extremely sensitive, because it doesn't apply at all 
to the spoken form. Probably the same for translation engines, although 
that's starting to change.

As for searching, it not only applies to people who can hear but not 
see, or the other way round. As an example, if there's French and Swiss 
German available, I'd choose Swiss German for listening but French for 
reading, because I don't have any experience in reading Swiss German. 
This situation is somewhat special, but I hope we don't want to exclude 
such special situations.

More generally, language classification in general and language tagging 
are about mutual intelligibility. Even if in the majority of cases, 
somebody who understands spoken language X will understand written 
language X, there are many cases where that doesn't apply.

> tags don't try to state the obvious here.

For content that is only in one modality, this applies. But what about 
content in more than one modality (video)?

> new variants or by revising the specification.

I think registering an extension is the best way to go. I think it's a 
good idea to inform [email-masked] once in a while and get 
feedback, but the requirement for "IETF review" would obviously be met 
by an RFC published by the SLIM WG. (see 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646#section-3.7 for details)

Regards,   Martin.