At 11:54 PM 6/4/97 -0700, Unicode Discussion wrote:
>Language is an intrisic characteristic of human readable text which is
>mandatory for certain types of processing. I can't think of any text
>characteristics other than language and charset that are.
Your use of the term "language" is overly general here. What you are really
referring to is a "writing system" which encompasses a language (comprising phonology,
morphology, semantics, and pragmatics), a set of symbols, and an orthography
which relates the language (in its varied aspects) to these symbols by means of
reading and writing rules. Within the context of a single language, one can vary
both the symbols used to denote the language and the rules of correspondence
between language and symbols. The common interpretation of "language tags" is
as an aggregate denotation of the writing system as a whole rather than the
language proper.
Regards,
Glenn Adams
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