At 05:10 PM 4/3/00 +0100, Nick Lamb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 02:53:42PM -0000, Karl Heinz Kremer wrote:
>> Why should English be treated differently than any other language?
>> Let's just add an English catalog to the default installation and
>> the user will not see any difference.
>
>There is already a catalog (en_GB) for British users of English who
>prefer to keep the OED spellings, rather than surrender to the
>alternate (but more common) American US spellings.
But perhaps not as relatively common as you might think. The world is full
of ex-British colonies that still use English closer to British English
than American English. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa...I don't know
about Canada. America would be the most significant ex-British colony that
diverged.
>I don't think any of us take it seriously (I often don't remember to
>set up i18n for ages after building a new system) because we've
>come to accept that something very *like* English will eventually
>be written by everyone, no matter how they spell colour, or what
>they call petrol and nappies. (*)
This is a shame, but I guess it's to be expected, particularly where
development is done by volunteers with limited time. Although big companies
like MS provide localised (* Note: Australian spelling. I gather we are on
our own in standardising all -ise and -ize words to -ise) English spelling
dictionaries, including Australian English, they don't seem to localise
their help, menus etc. Roll on, cultural imperialism.
>Anyway, expecting everyone to support translation catalogs just so
>that you can hack around bizarre grammatical features in some
>languages is a bit much. Instead try re-writing the code if you
>can, so that it uses separate phrases in each case.
Makes perfect sense.
>(*) Even in Japan, convergence is happening, although since it's
>in a foreign alphabet that's not as helpful as it might be.
I think the convergence is more superficial than it seems. Words are often
borrowed, but the pronunciations are warped beyond recognition; the words
are abbreviated at places that seem natural in Japanese but make them
unrecognisable in English; the words are given different meanings; and so
on. Many centuries of English's exposure to French has done very little to
make the languages similar, in spite of many borrowings (take a word like
"lingerie", for example).
Regards,
Ian
