NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/992

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-02 | 3.1 KB

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Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Language tagging
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
From: [e-mail] (David J Birnbaum)
Date: 2 Jan 93 17:29:57 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Keywords: ISO10646 Unicode
Lines: 47

>Just the input problem is enough to kill this idea, I think: The user
>would have to get the language of every character he types correct,
>and as somebody who routinely (as in usually large amounts every day)
>enters text in several languages (English, Swedish, and Finnish, with
>a few quoted words every now and then from a number of other
>languages, including German, Latin, and French) and often enough mixes
>several languages in one sentence, let me tell you that it is _not_
>going to succeed.  Having to switch language mode every few words, or
>for every different document, is not going a workable solution.

As is readily acknowledged by the UTC, Unicode encodes scripts, not
languages, which means that language-dependent information must be added
separately if language-dependent operations are to be performed. As has
been noted in this forum, language tagging does not solve all locale
problems, since (for example) sorting may follow different rules in
different locales within a single language.

I think the objections to the input-related problems of Vadim's proposal
are misdirected, since both Vadim's proposal and Unicode require the
user to input language identifying information during data entry if this
information will be needed for later processing. Under Vadim's
proposal, what would be input would be an instruction (not part of the
stored text stream) to shift to the appropriate subset of characters.
Under a system built on a Unicode character set, what would be input
would be some sort of language or locale tagging that would be entered
into the text at a higher level than character set.

In both cases, if you want language-specific data in your text stream,
you have to say so during input. If I need to insert Bulgarian words
into a Russian text stream I can do so without indicating a change,
as long as I understand that the consequence will be that the Bulgarian
data will be treated like Russian.

The difference between Vadim's proposal and Unicode, then, is not one of
input, but one of encoding levels; Vadim wants the language information
to be part of the character set, while Unicode puts it at a different
level. Regardless of which side one takes in this disagreement, the
user at the keyboard has to input "Finnish" or "German" or whatever if
he wants Finnish data to be treated differently from German data.

--David
--
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Professor David J. Birnbaum         [e-mail] [Internet]
The Royal York Apartments, #802     djbpitt@pittvms   [Bitnet]
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Pittsburgh, PA  15213  USA          fax:   [phone]