Re: [geolang-comment] what is a language

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

Thomas and al.

Remember in Barcelona TC meeting I voted against the publication of a PSI for the notion
of language. The real incapacity expressed by various below quotations to define this
notion absolutely supports that viewpoint.

The only thing a neutral PSI publisher can do, as Steve proposed as far as I can remember,
is to give extensive, authority-referring definition(s), like : "Language, as instance
identified by an ISO 639 language code". So many authorities, so many definitions. And let
field experts agree on the instances, and map those together if they feel like it.

And this is not particular to languages. Most subjects which are classes are better off
defined by an extensive list than by an intensive definition, for all practical purposes.
What is a "novel"? ... go figure ... But you can give a pretty good PSI for "Books
classified as novels in My Library 2002 Catalog" because there is a cutting way to declare
if any given book is or not in this class.
And basically, that's all we need for information exchange and retrieval purposes.

I think we should in GeoLang set an example of best practice for all those more or less
ill-defined classes of more or less well-defined instances, in the following way:

-- If class C is used by authority A to publish a list L of instances.
Then a PSI for "class C as defined by A" shoud define its subject in an extensive and
relative way, like:
"Class of which instances are defined and updated by authority A in the published list L"
Where A and L are individuals defined by a PSI ...

That way, all PSI structure is supported by individuals, which is the only way to have
effective identification.

Authority A is then defined as an acknowledged place where experts agree - whatever the
process of this agreement - on what are the instances of class C even if they can't
express any formal definition, and the list L will support versioning.

After all, every human being knows when she encounters another human being, even if nobody
has ever came - although many tried hard - to a proper definition of what an human being
is ... Or remember, for those who were last year in Montréal Extreme Markup, the excellent
introducing keynote by Tommie Usdin : "Everybody knows what a dragon looks like"

Bernard

PS: Read Murray's interventions after writing that. I think we are going along the same
lines here.


----- Message d'origine -----
De : "Bandholtz, Thomas" <Thomas.Bandholtz@koeln.sema.slb.com>
Ŕ : "'John Cowan'" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Cc : <geolang-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Envoyé : vendredi 7 juin 2002 12:55
Objet : RE: [geolang-comment] what is a language



> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
...
> That sounds just about right to me.  Where is the relaxed definition?

Good question! They apparently don't care. At least I could not find any
explicit definition around. The activity has been raised by UNESCO
http://firewall.unesco.org/culture/heritage/intangible/languages/html_eng/in
dex_en.htm

There is a discussion of criteria for endangeredness rather than of what a
language would be
http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/ell_home.html
http://www.terralingua.org/FAQs.html

Even "Mapping between ISO 639 Language Codes and the Languages Identified in
the Ethnologue"
http://www.ethnologue.com/iso639/

oops now I found something:
"What is a language? The term has been used in many different senses.
Popular usage often reserves the term 'language' for the major, prestigious
speech forms of the world, and uses 'dialect' for everything else. Some
people use 'language' to refer to speech forms that share a certain
percentage of similar vocabulary, and 'dialect' to refer to speech forms
that share higher percentages. Or they may consider varieties to constitute
the same language which have similar grammatical and phonological systems.
Many people, including some linguists, use the terms 'language' and
'dialect' without always clarifying the sense in which they are being used.

To those of us who are interested in cross-cultural communication and
developing usable literature for speakers of many languages, however, it
seems clear that one of the main factors that must be considered in
distinguishing 'language' from 'dialect' is how well two linguistically
close speech communities understand each other. Marginal intelligibility
between two language communities does not allow their speakers to engage in
meaningful communication beyond bare essentials....."
http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/introduction.asp

http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp is a brilliant informal PSI set
legacy!
They have URLs for each country like
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Norway
but not for each language. We should ask them to continue with
URL-per-language.

Thomas Bandholtz
Manager CM / KM
SchlumbergerSema
http://www.schlumbergersema.com

Kaltenbornweg 3
D50679 Köln / Cologne
Germany
+49 221 8299 264

----------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>