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

["Kal Ahmed" <kal@techquila.com>]

Murray wrote:

> Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> >
> > * 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.
>
> No, this was the crucial point. They did *not* standardize the languages
> and countries of the world, they standardized a list of their *names*
> as well as a set of codes as proxies for those names. Look at the name
> of each standard. Both ISO and IETF always call them "codes for the
> representation of languages", "Tags for the identification of languages,"
> etc. It's fallacious to do otherwise, and the current language and
> country topic maps do exactly the same thing, by conscious design. I
> remember arguing with Steve Pepper about this same issue. He's wrong
> and so is Lars Marius, unless we want to depart from ISO's usage.
> People can use the PSIs exactly as they would the ISO codes, and this
> is appropriate.
>

Perhaps I'm way off here, but don't people use the ISO codes precisely to
unambiguously represent the country/language ?

> > 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.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > 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.
>
> No, the PSIs established by these topic maps serve as proxies for
> the subjects, just as does any PSI. When people use the PSI they
> are agreeing in the same way as when they use the ISO code.
>

But aren't they agreeing on the country/language, not on the code for it ?

> > 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.
>
> This is either a red herring or you've not read the topic map very well.
> The 'de' string is scoped by being an alpha-2 code. The 'German' string
> is scoped by "English" meaning it's an identifier for anything German
> when you're speaking English. Let's be clear here.
>

This sounds to me like you are saying that the subject of the topic is
"German" and not "The ISO two-letter code for German", which would a more
precise form of English if the subject of the topic was the code and not the
language. So this confuses my in conjunction with your previous statements.

> > 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?
>
> Your argument holds no water; ISO and IETF have been doing precisely
> the same thing as these topic maps for many years. Unless we believe
> that TopicMaps.Org can be more authoritive than ISO we should steer
> clear of any such pretense of authoritarianism.
>

Perhaps I am being dim, but I feel that I need to understand this clearly
before expressing any more opinions on either language.xtm file, so please
try and help me on this:

Are the (majority of) topics in language.xtm (for now, lets just concentrate
on that one), as published on the TopicMaps.org website, intended to
represent the concept of "Languages" or the concept of "ISO Codes for
Languages" ?

Cheers,

Kal


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