Re: natural language

[Yutaka Yoshida <Yutaka.Yoshida@eng.sun.com>]

 > From: lisa.carnahan@nist.gov
 > X-Sender: carnahan@mailserver.nist.gov
 > Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 15:37:52 -0500
 > 
 > In thinking about the  information that a submitter would want a user to
 > know, the issue of natural languages has come up.
 > 
 > Two questions: 
 > 
 > Should we specify an element that contains the natural language that the
 > metadata is written in?
 
 I'm not sure what you want to do with that information, but probably,
 I guess the problem here is not that it lacks the information about
 natural language, but that it lacks the information about the
 encoding in which the element is.
 So, in that case, I think we need to have the element which tells
 what the encoding of the whole metadata is.
 (Lisa, please enlighten me if you have other concerns about the
 natural language.)
 
 However, it brings up another question: is it likely that
 one element is written in one language and the other element is
 in another language?

 > Should we specify an element that contains the natural language that the
 > registered-item (data element) is written in?   I'm assuming that
 > XML-related  and SGML-related documents can be written in natural languages
 > other than english?
 
 Yes, I think so. Also, in this case, it's very likely that one
 registered item is written in one language and the other item is
 written in the other language even they are in one 'packaged'
 objects.
 > 
 > We could use language-code as defined by ISO639 and a subcode of
 > country-code as defined by ISO3166.  (This is IMS' usage.)
 
 Lang. code and country code are not enough. We need the encoding
 information.
 Or, do we accept only one of the unicode, such as utf-8, or utf-16?
 
 I feel that's not the only issue in internationalization, and perhaps
 we should list up the issues and discuss them when we have a chance,
 I don't know how deep we want to step into i18n field from the
 point of regrep spec, though.
 
 yuta
 > 
 > --lisa