Subject: [Ltru] Identifying script (or global) variants

From: Martin Hosken <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:38:14 +0700

Dear All,

In my unstinting desire to be able to separate out script and language
from a language tag, it would be really nice if there was some
non-semantic mechanism by which a variant that is being used to modify a
script (and therefore has no constraining language in its specification)
may be identified over a language specific variant (which may be to do
with script, but is langauge specific).

There are numerous ways this could be done, for example by restricting
them to start with a specific letter or letters, or somesuch. Whichever
way that may result I see no problem in having to change standards since
it is merely a constraint on variant naming that can be added to the
standard after the fact if necessary. No change to the regexp or
anything that has gone before.

Is there any hope that I may be able to write code that can truly
separate language and script on this basis or should I give up now and
resign myself to having to track the latest repository and rerelease my
code every so often to reflect that?

Yours,
Martin

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:52:38 +0100

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 04:38:14PM +0700,
 Martin Hosken <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 28 lines which said:

> it would be really nice if there was some non-semantic mechanism by
> which a variant that is being used to modify a script (and therefore
> has no constraining language in its specification) may be identified
> over a language specific variant (which may be to do with script,
> but is langauge specific).

I have no idea right now but can you provide more specific examples,
in order to gain a better understanding of the problem?

> There are numerous ways this could be done, for example by
> restricting them to start with a specific letter or letters, or
> somesuch.

In the future 4646bis registry, there are only twelve variants, eight
seem to be related to the spoken language and two (the ones with
digits) related to the orthography (and so language-specific).

Only the remaining two, the famous fonipa and fonupa seem
language-independant.

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From: Martin Hosken <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 13:50:45 +0700

Dear Stephane,
> in order to gain a better understanding of the problem?

Consider a generic lexical database in which one knows the script of
fields but not necessarily the vernacular language being described. I.e.
the vernacular language is itself a value in the database. One wants to
be able to take that language and the script information and create a
language tag. So being able to parse a tag for script (including
variants) is key. In addition, very often rendering is based on script
independently of language (who cares what language, but IPA will always
be rendered using, say Doulos SIL).
> Only the remaining two, the famous fonipa and fonupa seem

Exactly. If we could keep the language-independent script variants to
all start with 'fon' that would be great. Much easier than having to
update a registry of them each time a new one is added. The hassle of
tracking the standard to watch for when such things are added must be
considered.

Yours,
Martin