> On Feb 15, 2008 8:44 PM, Alan Coopersmith > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Dave Miner wrote: > > >> Screenshot 03: First screen of Indy2 LiveCD > running in SXDE4, > > >> selecting keyboard. (This screen has a very > serious political > > >> ramification, I have submitted a bug report, > someone better pay some > > >> attention, or at least not show Indiana to any > Chinese officials.) > > >> > > > > > > Thanks for the reminder, I've transferred that > bug to Bugster so that we > > > can get kbd -s fixed. > > > > I must be missing the bug there - clearly that's a > list of regional keyboard > > variants, not national ones, since there are no > nations of Latin America or > > French Canada. > > The bug here is China's political sensitivities > regarding Taiwan, that > and the selection really isn't done in the correct > way. It's being > done based on nationality instead of language. > > -- > Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst > http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ > >
Hi Shawn, This problem is actually much more serious than we discussed in our private mails. As we know, there are two versions of written Chinese languages, traditional Chinese (繁体中文*， used in Taiwan, Hong Kong & Singapore) and simplified Chinese (简体中文， used in mainland China). Both are Chinese (中文）. I have never heard anyone calling the traditional Chinese "Taiwanese" (台湾文）。 There is, however, a very obscure (to say the least) "Taiwanese language", which is a Romanized Taiwanese dialect of the (spoken) Chinese language, see, e.g.: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/taiwanese.htm A friend of mine who is a professor at the University of Hawaii, was one of the creators of the Taiwanese (written) language, but hardly anyone knows of, or care about, its existence, not to mention any chance of using it, except a few hard-core pro-Taiwan-independence extremists. Supporting this group is against the United States policy: http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2006/Jan/31-671973.html I don't think we should even remotely get into a situation where we may be perceived as taking one political side against another. Fortunately, the solution to this issue is a no-brainer: the keyboard referred to in Indiana is definitely no "Taiwanese keyboard" (as I mentioned above, practically no one knows what it means), it is a Chinese keyboard. It can be used to input both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. This keyboard was developed in Taiwan initially for the input of traditional Chinese. But this is no reason to call it a Taiwanese keyboard, or even a traditional Chinese keyboard. * I was trying to type up traditional Chinese characters here, but Solaris is so totally screwed up in inputting traditional Chinese characters, I decided to give up. Typically I switched to SuSE when I have to use traditional Chinese. (As I mentioned some time ago in a separate thread, I took a legal action on behalf of our client, the national applied research labs of Taiwan, against the Treasure Department in 1995 because the Patent and Trademark Office labeled Taiwan "A Province of China". We prevailed in very quickly forcing the Patent Office to remove this designation. This is the opposite end of what we are doing in Indiana. Both situations should be avoided. It is, of course, unwise to trust what I said. Since I sensed no one in the developer corps is really familiar with this issue, the only wise way is to see what others are doing. Novell has a relatively well established sales force in China. Perhaps someone should look at what SuSE is doing re keyboard locale name designations. Windows and Mac should also be consulted.) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list indiana-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
