This discussion about linguistic details, language
markings, language representation, and how we can tag
everything is very interesting.
However is it something which this group has a high
degree of expertise in?
We are the experts for MIME headers and 822 issues.
We are discussing MIME headers to label important aspects
of content which have hitherto been suppresed due to our
previous bias for US-english in ascii.
Outside authority should (and will) be consulted for certain
details, but I think our discussions (in this thread) have
been sufficiently well focused to enable us to frame questions
for those authoritys and ultimately draft a useful spec,
hopefully we will be able to reference some authoritative lists of:
writing-systems,
verbal-language names,
Sign-Languages,
and what have you.
I am now leaving to review a library copy of:
Kenneth Katzner, The Languages of the World (1986).
Plus what ever else I can find on the shelf. I would welcome other
citations (hint hint) from Ohta-san and the other lurking linguists
as to other potentialy interesting tomes, hopefully in english.
I dont think Country-codes or even augmented country codes
will prove useful to our work outside of IP names, they do
not have a high enough correlation to language names or
writting systems to be usefull as synonyms for either.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>