A New Language Tag?

ClayCo — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:22:00 GMT

Those of you who know about RFC 3066 know that it's the standard which describes the tags that you should use to identify the language of an HTML or XML document's contents. For example, in XHTML you'd code something like:

. . .
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr" >
. . .
</html>

to tell the world that your page is in French. RFC 3066 (albeit with a few differences) is also the syntax of the culture names used by System.Globalization.CultureInfo.

What you may not have known is that there's a way to request new tags in case you need to extend the existing language tagging mechanism. This can be very useful if you need to indicate a language variety that isn't easily described with a language-and-country combination. On the other hand, well, I'll let today's request speak for itself:

LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM

Name of requester          : Jon Hanna
E-mail address of requester: jon [at] hackcraft.net
Tag to be registered       : en-Spam-porn

English name of language   : Pornographic Spam English

Native name of language (transcribed into ASCII):
Pr0n Freespeech ohbsehkzq!

Reference to published description of the language (book or article):
Your deleted mail folder

Any other relevant information:
The relationship between this dialect and other forms of English is
tenuous and perhaps more a matter of historical accident than any
stronger linguistic relationship. Some would argue that it is a
separate language, and some that it isn't a language at all but
illiterate gibberish, however considering it to be a dialect of English
is perhaps the most balanced position.

Interestingly, it is the probably the only dialect of any language that
can be encoded entirely in US-ASCII without doing any (further) violence
to the language. Conversely, it is also probably the only language that
can be inscribed with the use of a diacritical mark on every single
character, even spaces.

The dialect appears to have very complicated punctuation rules, so
complicated that there is strong evidence that no one fully understands
them. The exclamation mark (U+0021, and no doubt U+203C once they
discover it) appears not to be a punctuation character within the
dialect, but a symbol of some sort of religious or superstitious
fascination within the user community. The anthropologist might refer
to this as a "fetish", though he or she would be wise not to lead any
member of the user community to believe that he or she had any interest
in fetishes.

Despite widespread belief to the contrary it appears that some people
really do have this as their first, and indeed only, language. These
people would be to be pitied, if we could have the luxury of doing so
without actually coming into contact with them or their dialect.

The pun is considered the highest form of expression within the dialect,
although no user of the dialect has ever demonstrated any talent at
creating them.

Special Treatment -

Traditionally the dialect is encoded with whatever charset is believed
most likely to confuse a filter. Adoption of the UCS is increasingly
common amongst the user community as it provides a source of yet more
characters that look a bit like other characters.

Semantic software should not attempt to differentiate between definite
and indefinite articles or should treat them specially. These are not
used as they are in other dialects of English where they specify a
particular or a general example of the associated noun, but rather to
reflect a self-deluding belief in universality of a fetish item as the
user community has a strong religious belief that we are all equally
pathetic perverts to themselves. This religious belief contains a
strong emphasis on proselytising for which the user community eagerly
adapt new communication technologies including those produced by the
IETF.

In rich-text formats in which the text can be coloured there is a
strong preference towards red.

I'll readily admit that this is probably the most articulate request for a new language tag in a long time, and that reading it left me with only one question: Arê yØu`l00ki.ng 4_ä gõod t|mé?

For those of you wondering how serious this request could be, consider today's date. For everyone else, please remember that you have two weeks (starting today) to comment on the request.

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A New Language Tag?