Re: [xtm-wg] New language.xtm and country.xtm proposals

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* H. Holger Rath
| 
| Thanks for this valuable work. I hope we could approve both
| in Montréal.

So do I. :-)
 
| We discussed this in length in Austin and the group drew to the
| conclusion that we cannot define what the language and what the
| country subjects are. Furthermore, the subjects defined in
| language.xtm and country.xtm are no languages and no contries; the
| subjects are the codes ISO defined for some languages and countries.

In that case there is no point in having these PSI sets.

I can understand that people feel uneasy about "standardizing the
languages of the world", but this has already been done by ISO 639,
and if anyone has a problem with that they should take it up with the
responsible ISO committee and DIN as the maintenance agency.

In i18n.ltm I have an association that says that German is spoken in
Germany. I can't make German and Germany instances of codes, because
the one code is not spoken in the other; in other words, I would be
saying something different from what I mean. The same issue of course
appears in a huge number of topic maps.

So if the topics in language.xtm are not instances of languages they
are useless. The reason we want to have them is that we want to be
able to talk about languages. If we end up having topic maps that make
statements about language codes we have achieved nothing.

Furthermore, the current version of language.xtm says that the
language code 'de' has two names:

  'de'
  'German'

I think it is reasonable to claim that the name of the language code
is 'de', but to claim that the code has the name 'German' is absurd.
There is a language, known by the names 'German', 'Deutsch', 'tysk',
and many others, as well as by the code 'de', but the code itself has
no name but itself.

In short, I can't see how these topic maps can be of any use to anyone
unless the topics in them are instances of 'country' and 'language',
respectively. Surely that must be the point of the whole exercise?

--Lars M.


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