Re: [Ltru] Commonwealth English orthography

Mark Davis 2008-05-15 22.10:

> Perhaps the situation is being misunderstood.

You better bet spesific if you present assumtions.

> In lookup, you have to return *something* when someone asks for "en"
> (or "de", or "no", or "zh", or "zh-Hant", etc.) Normally, this should
> be the form that is most likely to be what the user understands.

You are confirming the similarities between handeling English and 
handeling a Macrolanguage.

> For "en", the most widely used form is the same as "en-US"; for "de"
> it is "de-DE", and so on. This may change over time, for English at
> some time in the past it would have been "en-GB", and who knows, it
> may be "en-IN" at some point in the future.

Where was the claimed misunderstanding?

The problem on the Mac OS X is that localisations which are "en-US" in 
nature, have been placed, by Apple, inside folders which are tagged as 
'en'.

Thus, we see that Apple has not realized the need for "English 
negotiation".

This is a pity, because if Apple had taken seriously the need for 
English negoatiation, then it would have been simple for them to 
understand - and aknowledge the need for - macrolanguage negotation as well.

The proper thing, in a language negotiation situation, is to be 
spesific. Or - actually, the key is to say two things simultaneously: I 
want "English spesific", but if not, then I want "English general".

The damage of not offering macrolanguage negotiation is/can of course be 
much more serious than the lack of offering a proper "English 
negotiation" can be.

However, those who prefers non-US English would do the rest of the 
languages in the World a great favour if they demanded proper "English 
negotiation" from Apple - or which ever wendor. Because that way they 
raise the awareness of the problem and shows a way to solve it.

> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no> wrote:
>
> > Nicholas Shanks 2008-05-15 16.58:
> > > Translations on the Mac OS [...]
> > > en (with US spellings)
> > > en_GB (with commonwealth spellings)
> > > en_everything_else symlinked to en_GB or duplicated (if symlinks don't
> > > work, haven't tested this yet) [...]
> >
> > As I have stated on list and outside: The problem you take up here, is
> > very similar to the Macrolanguage problem.
> >
> > The problem occurs because you - and Apple - have chosen to use the most
> > generic tag 'en' for 'English US', instead of using 'en_US', as you
> > should have done.
> >
> > This behaviour illustrates what happens when one uses the most generic
> > tag - the Macrolangauge tag - for the dominant encompassing language,
> > instead of using the spesific, encompassing language tag: It makes it
> > very difficult and cumbersome to perform language negotiation.
-- 
leif halvard silli

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