Dana S Emery writes:
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.
I am going to attempt mind-reading....bear with me.
I think what is being ask is "Do we have enough expertise to decide if
Content-language:
is all that is needed? or do we have to do something like
Content-language:
Content-language-dialect:
or maybe even this
Content-language:
Content-language-dialect:
Content-language-Geographical-Region:
or maybe even .............................. "
To make the example less abstract. If I remember my linquistics correctly
these are all valid:
Content-language: American
Content-language: American
Content-language-dialect: Northern
Content-language-Geographical-Region: East Coast/Pennsylvania
Content-language: American
Content-language-dialect: Northern
Content-language-Geographical-Region: Midest/Michigan
Content-language: American
Content-language-dialect: Northern
Content-language-Geographical-Region: West Coast/California
Actually Content-language-Geographical-Region: headers are not correct
they should be limited to mining cities (or cities that started off as
mining cities):
Content-language: American
Content-language-dialect: Northern
Content-language-Geographical-Region: East Coast/Pennsylvania/Pittsburg
Given all this, isn't this enough:
Content-language: American/Northern/East Coast/Pennsylvania/Pittsburg
Dana, I do agree with you that all of this would be really coool to
include into MIME; however, I think we need to know what an appropriate
breakdown would be - and to define the headers accordingly. The more I
think about this the more cautious I become.
The above example is a very real problem, we hear it in our lives everyday.
I would love to be able to send mail that when played back makes my words
sound like a New Yorker (which I am - originally). But when you look at it
you see that it is a very complicated problem - and this is only 20th c.
American (not even English:-) .
If I get some time I will try and visit with a few linguistics profs.
they might have the answer and the answer might be trivial. In the mean
time I don't this we should drop the matter, I think that it still must
be solved (Glyphs aren't going to cut it in the example given above).
BTW: you do realize that as soon as a person writes a program that
given an input file and a desired language can spit out a file
written in the universal linguistics language (which I have blank
out of my memory - too much mind-reading earlier) and vice-versa
the whole notion of Content-language* becomes obsolete.
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Neophytos Iacovou
Honeywell Systems & Research Center
iacovou(_at_)src(_dot_)honeywell(_dot_)com
Minneapolis, Mn, 55418