[Ietf-languages] ISO 21636 Dimensions (was: Language subtag registration form)

[Richard Wordingham <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 23:40:37 -0300
Sebastian Drude <[e-mail]> wrote:


> The eight dimensions we identified for the purposes of standardized
> coding:
> 
>  1. Space (dialects & over-regional standard varieties)
>  2. Time (epochs, periods, stages)
>  3. Social group (sociolects, including more specific technolects)
>  4. Medium (modalities: oral/multimodal, written, signed, whistled,
>     drummed...)
>  5. Situation (registers, e.g. of different formality, including
> genres and the like)
>  6. Person (“personal varieties” ~ elswhere sometimes called
> “idiolects”) 7. Proficiency (learner varieties)
>  8. Communicative functioning (constrained communicative functioning
>     varieties, 'anomalies')

I'm having a bit of trouble envisaging how one would apply this model
to certain situations.

The first one is orthography.  The simplest one is that of script.  For
example, articles in the Serbian Wikipedia may be delivered in Cyrillic
or Latin, at the reader's choice.  Which dimension does that difference
sit on?

After that comes the question of orthography within the script.  I'm
not sure that differences with a political tint (Russian, Lao) come
within the time dimension, and the gross differences in Thai script
Northern Thai (Thai names thap sap v. rup pariwat) definitely don't.

For the oral medium, where does tempo come in?  That significantly
affects a dropping of distinctions, so may be relevant for converting
text to speech and possibly vice versa.

Would 'communicative functioning' include matters like punctuation?
The same passage in the same script in Pali can have quite a
variation in punctuation system.  Perhaps that's a separate subdimension
within 'time'. Similarly, Pali chants in Thai script use different
writing systems for the masses and for more academic use - the former
is an 'alphabet' by Daniels' definition and the latter is an abugida.
Is this difference on the 'communicative functioning' dimension?

Old manuscript European documents can be full of abbreviations - bars
for Vr and rV survived quite late in Modern English.  The abbreviations
are usually expanded when such documents non-palaeographically
transcribed.  Is the use of these abbreviations on the 'communicative
functioning' dimension?

Comparing the English of Sebastian's post I'm replying to this reply, I
noticed only a few differences:

SD's regional variety could be British, using the spelling preferred by
the Oxford English Dictionary (viz. '-ize' rather than '-ise'), whereas
mine is, I think clearly British (shibboleth: 'palaeographic').

Mine might be older - 1960s or 1970s judging by the writing "viz.",
though the vocabulary is later.

'Situation' is difficult to name.  I think it's fairly formal, apart
from the seemingly mandatory use of contracted auxiliary verbs and the
use of first names.  Perhaps 'formal but for obligatory informality'.
Or are the deviations from formality covered by 'communicative
functioning'?  I could be wrong; perhaps my use of 'a bit of trouble'
makes it informal.

SD's 'proficiency' is within the usual native range.  The one grammar
error I spotted when scanning for Americansims, "whether if", looks
like a case of incomplete editing.

Richard.