If you recall, I'd agreed to drop PartNumberStyle back to RFC status due to
debate on the RFV, but had delayed any further action while a few of us
involved in the discussion were dealing with vacations and other offline
issues. Now that enough time has passed, I think, for us all to be back,
I'd like to bring this RFV back to the table. As the original RFC was kept
open, I don't think I need to re-RFC. To be fair, however, I will give a 7
day expiration on the RFV, rather than simply the normal 48 hours. So, if
it should happen that there are no continued objections, this one would pass
on Friday, early AM (EST), July 24.
The last suggestion made had been to replace the space-en-dash-space
describing 3+ contiguous parts with the word "to", as a compromise for those
who objected to the spaces. If you'll recall, I already had agreed, and
incorporated into the proposal, to inserting an exception, regarding the
spaces, for cases involving only Arabic numbers ("0-9", but "I - III").
Regarding the suggestion to use "to" instead of the en-dash, I've given it a
good deal of thought, but have come to a decision that I would prefer to
keep the en-dash, rather than substitute the word "to". It is true that
some English style guides (as well as Wikipedia, if I recall correctly)
suggest the word "to" be used, instead of the en-dash, in these types of
non-Arabic number cases, for clarity. However, this guideline applies more
broadly. In the language of the guideline itself, "part words", in
different languages, are to be kept as they are in those other languages,
and not translated to English. A simple substitution of "to" for the
en-dash would work only work for English. But even if we extended the
guideline there to have the word "to" be translated as well, to the language
of the track, it still is problematic.
If the editor does not speak the language of the track he or she is working
on, or adding, then (unless we provided a list of "to" words for all 150+
languages), that editor may easily not have any idea what the local "to"
word is - or if he or she tries a translator, that editor may easily end up
with a word that makes no actual sense, using the wrong translation for the
word "to". Additionally, "to" can often be (correctly) translated as many
different words; even in English it (in this meaning) has many near synonyms
that could be substituted in this context and make sense, such as "toward"
or "through". So we would replace a single punctuation mark with a literal
Babel of possible words. Besides the problems editing, this would also make
it difficult for data users to handle such data. Remember, this guideline
doesn't just cover "Parts 1-3", but also "Chapters", "Lectures", and many,
many other words describing some type of multi-part situation. If the end
user wanted to try to parse the text of a title to handle
multiple-parts-in-same-track situations in some localized way, matching and
handling these is greatly simplified when it's using a standard punctuation
mark, especially when compared with potentially hundreds of different words
in many different languages.
So I'm choosing to keep the proposal as it is at the moment, keeping the
en-dash and keeping the inserted exception for the only-Arabic-numbers case.
Brian
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