Re: core components analysis

[Duane Nickull <duane@xmlglobal.com>]

"William J. Kammerer" wrote:

> True, RFC-1736 lets you distinguish between U.S. English and British
> English (en-US and en-GB).  But the Library of Congress doesn't see fit
> to make any such distinction in ISO 639-2, probably because there is no
> discernible difference between the way educated Canadians, Americans,
> British and Australians *formally* speak and write the language, the
> "whilsts" and "colours" to the contrary notwithstanding.  Keep in mind
> the Queen is the most American-sounding of you people.  I don't know
> French, though I suspect the same attends what educated speakers use in
> Québec, Mali and France.
>>>>>>>>>>>

Being Canadian, it is annoying that I have to submit the TA Spec in US
English, rather than Canadian English.  (BTW - the speaking part does
not take into account words like "about" and "eh" - the latter being the
formal way to end each sentence ;-)  Canadian English is the same as
en-GB for the most part.  

What will probably be the archilles heal is the fact that sometimes it
could be a program seeking a specific item in which case one letter will
make a difference.

The Canadian French is going to a problem in this case.  Another
potential problem is the way each country spells other countries.  Here
is an example:

If I am a company in France and I am not allowed to import any beef
products from Belguim, I need to carefully track the origin of such
products.  A Canadian Company may have an XML snippet identifying the
country of a products origin:

...
<produit xml:lang="FR">Potage de boeuf</produit>
<importéDe>Belgium</importéDe>
...

But my application knows that I cannot import anything from "Belgique",
the formal french word for the country we call Belgium, the discernable
differences couold be a problem.

Having played devil's advocate, I think that there is only so much we
can do.  

William:  Thank BTW for the education on Native American languages.  Do
you know if the Salish, Mi’kmaq, Innuit and Haida languages are included
in 693?

Duane Nickull