Language
From Wikistandards
[edit] Introduction
Certainly for all standards that have something to do with languages, it is important to understand what languages are. One of the not so formal definitions has that "a language is a dialect with a navy". As many people think this is discriminatory to landlocked countries, it is also said to be "a language is a dialect with an army". The problem however with both definitions is that languages do not stop at borders nor are many languages geographically determined.
The consequence is that the precise definition of what a language is arbitrary. This problem is compounded by the fact that languages evolve, every generation has its own vocabulary. Many standardised languages recognise this by changing their orthography with some regularity.
The knowledge what language exist has many applications. Important to understand is that what makes a language limits the application of the language. You can hear someone speak in many languages, but you will not understand. You can see written text of many languages but you can not read it. You can provide tools with manuals or user interfaces in clear explicit text and it is useless if it is in a language that is not understood by the person who wants to use the tool.
With the advent of computers and Internet many new reasons to define languages were needed. Computers crawl the web to supply search engines with what is available. Much of the current content is not properly labelled and software is used to determine what language a text is in. Computers are used to spell check text but it relies on the orthography to match what the user expects. Computers are used to aid translators with computer aided translation programs in order to reliably and efficiently translate text from one language to another. All this relies on a good understanding of what language it is that is applicable.
[edit] RFC's and Standards
[edit] Stub
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