Masataka Ohta quoting David Heron
>Masataka seems worried that the "en" of today may
>bear very little resemblance to the "en" of 200
>years from now,
No. I just pointed out that it could be handled by time
stamping, which is anyway necessary if we seriously need
language distiction by coutry name.
A time stamp could well be useful, but pinning down the
boundaries of laguage evolution is probably rather difficult.
The scism of GB chinese has definite dates because it was a politically
implemented change, and we can probably look
forward to more such, but evolutionary changes will be real
hard to pin down, so any such time stamping would have to
recognize era labels as well as discrete dates.
I'm unconvinced that contry name is essential to
distinguish languages.
I dont think it works cleanly enough to use as a reference.
Too many countrys are themselves polyglot in ways that
encourge instability (of all sorts).
Country codes are usefull for identifying countrys.
Language codes are needed for identifying languages.
Script codes are needed for identifying writing systems.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>