Re: [geolang-comment] First proposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

> 
> * Steve Pepper
> |
> | Surely whether things "make sense" or not is not for us to decide?


Certainly not. We cannot solve this problem for all contexts of use,
as "sense" only "makes sense" within a specific context. "Common
sense" is a misnomer.


> I think that in transferring something as messy and unstructured as
> ISO 639 into something as ontological as topic maps we have no choice.
> To create a published subject set that mandates dubious assertions is
> IMHO not at all a good idea.

[...]

Hmmm. Pardon me for butting in, but I'm curious as to how (apart
from any perceived mistakes in naming the typing topics) the current
approach is different from the one taken in the current language set?
I seem to remember arguing back in December of 2000 about this, but
my assertion remains, i.e., that it's dangerous to tread into this
territory any further than to simply reify the available 639 language
codes and let interpretation and use of them be up to the user and
their specific application, the same approach as ISO has chosen in
this regard. It seems foolhardy to attempt more.

I don't believe topic maps are by their nature any more "ontological"
than any other representation of knowledge. The ISO 639 set of codes
representing the names of languages is similarly "ontological," and
the meanings of those codes surely should not change merely because
of their transformation into [XTM] Topics. Any additional meaning
would be beyond the scope of this TC and require a team of linguistic
experts, who would likely never agree to more than a simple
representation of language names, never on language groupings. It's
been shown recently that the concept of "race" is fallacious, and the
idea that there are distinct boundaries between languages (and not a
continuum, a continual intermixing and evolution) is similarly
fallacious, and that this has been shown in linguistic research. Why
attempt to tread upon a territory that is *known* to be full of land
mines? I keep hearing this same discussion brought up again and again.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

      One of the sad things about corporations is that despite
      their name they have no corpora, no body responsible for
      their actions. They are therefore free to do whatever is
      the will of those who control them, and can transmogrify
      as necessary, like ghosts, to thwart those who might try.
                                                          --ma