RE: [OT] RE: [ga] Aviation languages

["Debbie Garside" <debbie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

JFC
 
I think we need a little clarification here as you seem to be very adept at
taking other people's ideas and claiming them as your own. Wrt RFC4646, I
believe you had been suspended and then permanently excluded from the IETF
forum many months prior to RFC4646 being published.  In any case most
members of the forum had blocked you so any ideas you had would not have
been received.   
 
Wrt MLTF (your spin-off because IETF excluded you) it is a one man band as
are AFRAC and INTLNET and the many other entities you create.  No doubt you
will start an organization which will mean that you can "legitimately" use
the domain name of "my" WLDC (www.wldc.org) that you are currently cyber
squatting.
 
The IETF RFC that you have written is again just you and there is not one
other person that I can find within IETF who supports it.
 
The reason for your being invited to the ISO meeting in Paris, to try to
stop you from sending all the emails to ISO CS, AFNOR (30 a day) and the ISO
TC46 WG involved with discussing the BSI's NWIP for Internationalized
Country Codes.  That is all.  It was not in any way to include your
"organizations" or your views in the ISO process.
 
I count myself as fortunate that I work for myself otherwise my employer
would be receiving a telephone call from the "President" of one of your
organizations - others have not been so lucky causing them great distress. 
 
If you stopped the pretences JFC and stopped claiming other people's ideas
as your own you may find that people would take you more seriously.  I have
told you this many times and still you keep doing the same thing.  Post as
yourself and leave me and my businesses out of it.
 
Best
 
Debbie
 
 


  _____  

From: owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
JFC Morfin
Sent: 18 July 2007 01:41
To: Debbie Garside; roberto@xxxxxxxxx; 'Jaap Akkerhuis'; genetech@xxxxxxxx
Cc: ga
Subject: Re: [OT] RE: [ga] Aviation languages


Dear all,
This post uses the GA debate example to the advantage of the MLTF mailing
list. However, some on the GA mailing list may be interested in commenting
on it, since it is a key issue for naming as well as local Internet usage. I
will forward their comments on the MLTF and will be used to formalise this
post into an IETF Draft for information.
jfc

---

Subject: "Aviation Languages"

The subject of this ICANN/GNSO/GA thread seems to have a particularly well
defined meaning in English...since the GA Members are extensively discussing
it. In French, it is only a non-translatable confusion. This is important
for understanding as to just why Debbie and her WLDC (http://thewldc.org
<http://thewldc.org/> ) and our (http://mltf.org <http://mltf.org/> ) MLTF
tend to have various converging and diverging points of view and
motivations, that I propose to make into coopeting (
<http://mltf.org/070622-prop.pdf> http://mltf.org/070622-prop.pdf). The same
remark applies to ISO TC 37 and ISO TC 46 and current NWIP.


1. The confusion

The confusion comes into play when the English "language" term is used to
support two very different concepts that French differentiates: 

*	the language of a linguistic community (English, Italian, French) -
in French: "langue" 

*	the language of a specialized community (Aviation, Internet [for
ALAC], programming, e-commerce, standards) down to even a single individual
in a given situation - in French: "langage". 

To clarify this confusion, one must take into account that: 

*	most do not realize that to technically support billions of
"langages" and a hundred "langues" is quite similar, in which each
linguistic unit is supported via an ad hoc corpus enacted through the same
architecture. The real issue is the architecture, and not the number of
languages. 

*	a human person has his/her own "langages" in his/her own single or
few "langues" for education and memory limitation reasons. 

*	the Internet community largely has more difficulties due to the
translation costs and administation. 

*	Internet technology has a near imossibility due to the lack of a
presentation layer in the TCP/IP pile. 

*	the Unicode community has fewer due to the UCS and CLDR (locale
files). 

*	the DNS has no real problem except for the confusion over what it is
to do, how, and where. 

*	the computer has no difficulty, provided that it has the proper
architecture and documentation. 

*	imposing a standardized "langage" (for example: administrative
language as documented by ISO 3166-1) is not a technical barrier to Trade. 


2. The current situation

Atop that situation, a cultural technical, political, and commercial status
quo has developed:



*	English represents most of the presentation-session-less missing
Internet Interoperating System 


	It is like aviation: only one single global English "presentation"
(general usage) is permitted, and possible locally limited Italian sessions
(on a per flight basis). This is not too dangerous, because if you hear an
aviation "langage" dialog, whatever the "langue", you can still understand
most of its aviation specific "langage". The same with ICANN: you can
understand most of what an ICANN paper is about (not what it says) in many
languages. 

*	It builds language support as an option atop that of the
environment. 


	This is the consistent IETF approach for the last 10 years. This
results in the "internationalization" of the mediums, "localization" of the
ends, and description (tagging) of the content. This is documented by the
BCP 47. We all know as IDNs, as an application additional option. 

*	It calls for language filtering instead of support 


	When a language is requested, and is not supported, the dialog is
redirected towards a less acceptable but possible language, or filtered out
altogether (RFC 4647). I do not speak Finnish, but you can try to understand
my Estonian or my Hungarian pages. At the end of the day everyone will
e-commerce and work together using the default English language.



	3. The poor consequences

This may seem a good thing to English speakers. However... 

*	it is likely that human beings, being human beings, that there will
be no e-commerce by that time. 

*	the resulting impact on cultures would be a tremendous catastrophy. 

*	the lack of resultant technical development would delay the world by
decades. 

*	etc. 

	This debate belongs to that cultural status quo among technical
people, which denies people the Human Right to use their own language to
live, manage, and innovate. The problem (well documented as a basic Internet
problem by the IAB in RFC 3869) is that there is no commercial incentive
today to support more "langues". From this comes, the difficulties that
Debbie documents and you (GA) meet. This is obviously highly detrimental to
culture and humanity's legacy. And this matches two of the five
international legal definitions of what a genocide is (to force people to
live in using another language, to educate kids in a culture not desired by
their parents).

However, there are technical, political, and further on enormous commercial
incentives to support "langages", and an awful lot of money that is poorly
spent because the proper model is confused by this English language
confusion (II am referring to the metadata domain and semantic web).


4. The correct approach

The other approach we support is architectural, and is motivated by network,
security, etc. development, which we call "multilingualization". It consists
of being able to support every language the way English is supported today. 

*	either people do not understand what it means and consider us as
dumb fools and boring trolls; 

*	either they understand us too well and they are afraid of the impact
on their technology, policy, e-commerce, cultures, etc. and oppose or
disregard us. 

*	or they understand the importance of this impact and support us, but
we are at the beginning of a long march for research, devlopment, and
deployment. It takes a very long time to understand and accept the obvious:
this is no exception. 

	This only delays development and innovation for eveyone, and
endangers a correct approach to semantic processing and networking.


5. The stakes

Languages are human brain to brain interintelligibility protocols, which use
different syntaxes and terminologies with an impact on logical exchanges,
supporting semantic (meaning's level) relations, in order to exchange
information (content) in a manner that is itself (pragmatics) a compression
of knowledge [in a relation wherein you assume that much information is
already known from your interlocutor]. Syntax, terminology [in one or
several languages], semantic approaches, content thematics, pragmatic usages
together form a pattern that could identify originating individual brains
(human or computer). There are therefore enormous incentives for engaging in
"langage" related developments and protection research.

Languages are also brain programming languages. Working on languages permits
one to better educate, inform, etc. and analyze knowledge, in which working
on a "polynymy" (invariance in describing a concept in different languages)
one greatly simplifies the conceptual analysis and the interest of the
semantic web. There are also, therefore, huge incentives for engaging in
"langue" related developments.


6. The presentation layer

However, if all this is confused by the "language/langue-langage" lack of
IETF/ISO TC37 differentiation, this is further complexified (as in IDNs) by
the fact that Internet technology has no "presentation" layer. 

This is perceived as an advantage for e-commerce and e-political English
lobbies, because it leads everything to be specified, supported, and
operated in ASCII and the entire network to be possibly unified under IANA
and ICANN. This is in fact highly detrimental because it prevents the
Internet from supporting our (each human being and organisation) lingual,
cultural, local, family, private, corporate, etc. visions ("presentations").
This is partly, resulting in most of the architectural problems that we now
face. Not only with IDNs, but also with IPv6, routing, governance, etc.

This is in fact a "layer violation" (you do something at the wrong place,
which then quickly prevents scalability). Languages, as in IDNs, like in the
RFC 4647 filtering approach, etc. are considered as options that are being
supported atop the English background. The result is that roughly 150 locale
files for 130 languages (some have two scripts) are supported today, while
the ISO 639-3 that IETF wants to support documents 7,500 languages. Debbie's
ISO 639-6 project targets 20/30,000 language "archeological" entities (they
will be long dead when it is accurate!), while new languages appear every
day.


7. The correct approach

Whatever the solution, it can only be based on sound premises. This demands
the acceptance that there is a layer violation on the Internet side and
confusion on the ISO side. 

The necessary technical culture is progressing. For example, in
chronological order:



*	I tricked the IETF in producing an interoperable RFC 4646 text (to
support its language doctrine) that is clear enough to be interoperable. 

*	John Klensin proposed to remove the linguistic aspects from the IDNA
and keep them purely script oriented. 

*	the metacoms concept (transporting information about the content and
meaning of information) advances slowly through: 


*	the Semantic Web concepts, 

*	the possible IETF OPES, 

*	the JTC1/SC32/WG2 work on metadata registries, etc. 

*	my pending proposal 

	However, we are so embedded in the IETF "English", "decentralized",
and "end to end" paradigm that there is some difficulty in understanding
that many of the Internet poblems result from there specifically: the
differences between the way we perceive reality and the model of virtuality
that a limited Internet imposes on us. 

The response of the GA of the Internet DNS users should be to complain about
the fact that the ISO, IETF, UNICODE, etc. have not yet made it possible to
have universal pervasive multilingal Internet support, in turn making the
problem obsolete. Amazingly, that complain was absent from the debate.
Instead they discussed costs, treeshold computation for HR enforcement,
marketing.

This only shows that their assembly do not represent the users and explain
why China adopted a grassroots independent strategy, development, and
deployment.

jfc


At 14:01 17/07/2007, Debbie Garside wrote:


	Language is important to the people that speak it.  It is part of
their
cultural heritage.  Whilst English is recognised as a lingua franca around
the world it is important that policies are put into place to protect
"small" languages.  According to a well known linguist, 3000 of the recorded
6-7,000 languages (Ethnologue/ISO 639-3 lists 7,200) currently alive will
die within 100 years.
http://www.crystalreference.com/DC_articles/Langdeath19.pdf 

Who cares?  Not governments that's for sure because there are very little or
no funds for language documentation or language revival.  Not industry
because it doesn't make economic sense -
http://www.native-languages.org/linguistics.htm#tree. I have tried for 6
years to get people interested enough to fund language documentation -it is
a thankless task (one of my many). The only people interested are linguists
and the speakers themselves.

Bringing the topic of conversation back in line with the objectives of this
forum, should we translate the NARALO MoU into Inuit/Inuktitut* and Cree**
and other native languages?  Answer, yes we should.  Does it make economic
sense?  Answer, sadly no.  Very often, and certainly in this case, the
translation of documents is about getting information to the most people
possible and this does not mean translating into languages that represent
the mother tongue of less than 1% of the population albeit 100% of the
indigenous population; especially where these people have knowledge of a
second language - in this case English and French.  Sad but true.  

Best

Debbie
PS Anyone interested in language documentation or language
protection/revival may make large donations to The World Language
Documentation Centre www.thewldc.org <http://www.thewldc.org/>  I happen to
be CEO :-)

*  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_language>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_language
**  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_language>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_language


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [  <mailto:owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> mailto:owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Roberto Gaetano
> Sent: 16 July 2007 22:37
> To: 'Jaap Akkerhuis'; ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; martin.boyle@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ga] Aviation languages
> 
> Jaap,
> 
> >     
> >     As far as I know English is mandatory.
> > 
> > It is. And there is a protocol to switch to another 
> languages in case 
> > the parties desire.
> > 
> > For more details, google for "aviation languages" and similar terms.
> 
> 
> <maybe off topic, or just borderline...>
> 
> With all due respect, I made the statement about languages 
> not because I *thought*, but because I *know* from personal 
> experience that Italian can rightfully be used under certain 
> circumstances by pilots while flying over the italian air 
> space. Specifically, the use of italian is lawful for all VFR 
> flights, that are still the vast majority of the flights 
> where amateur pilots engage. And since it is the pilot who 
> initiates the conversation, for instance with the control 
> tower when still in parking position, there is no protocol 
> needed: he/she chooses the language.
> Please have a look at the document of the National (Italian) 
> Authority for Civil Aviation:
> http://www.enac-italia.it/documents/download/nor/Reg-Regole_Ar
> ia.pdf. This is updated as of 2006-10-03, and has clear text 
> on paragraph 3.10 (in italian).
> Incidentally, this text is similar to the one used in 
> different countries, simply because it is taken from the 
> Annex 10 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, 
> issued by ICAO.
> 
> I do acknowledge that English is, and will remain for the 
> foreseeable future, *the* language used in international 
> situations (like this list, for instance). But also that 
> there are local situations (that also are here to stay for a 
> while) where communication is done using local languages. I 
> know that opinions vary about to which extent an 
> international (common) language should be used vs. a national 
> (local) language. Dutch and French, to quote an example.... ;>)
> 
> Best regards,
> Roberto
> 
> 
> 
>