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Re: Names of languages

1993-03-07 02:28:07
John's note about "old UAs", language tagging and 10646 made some good
points.

I'm not really interested in language tagging (yet), but for those of
you that are, here are some more ideas.

The ISO language tags (e.g. "en" for English, "ja" for Japanese) are
used together with "country" tags (e.g. "US" for the US, "JP" for
Japan) by some people, e.g. the X/Open locale identification:

    [in UNIX "csh":]

    setenv LANG ja_JP.SJIS

This is because the languages are used differently in the various
countries.  For example, the British write "colour" while the
Americans write "color".  So if anybody's interested in getting down
to that level of absur^H^H^H^H^Hspecificity, you could use 4-octet
tags for the language (e.g. enUS).

I will add that it is easy to add such tags to "MU".  For example, if
the three escapes are =, _ and - respectively, and the combinations -_
and -= have not been used for other things yet, then you could use
these two for 2-octet and 4-octet language tags.  E.g.

    Nice colors are included, -_frpar example-_en, beige.

Here we assume that the text starts in "en" (in much the same way that
we assume that email starts in ASCII when using iso-2022-jp).  Also,
the word "beige" comes from French, but is now English too, whereas,
"par example" is French and not used in English.  Also, you assume
that "en" mean "enUS" unless otherwise specified (note "colors").  Or
you could state the language that the message starts in, in the
headers:

    Content-Language: frCH

(French as used in Switzerland.)

As you can see, these tags add unnecessary clutter to email messages
if they are used *today*, but *if* such a method were to catch on in
the email community, then people might dare to use such tags.  *Until*
such a method catches on, we *will* see people using the usual method,
e.g.:

    This is pretty mendoukusai (as they say in Japan), i.e. far too
    much work, and very little benefit.


Erik


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