The reply from Mr Verdy has indeed been helpful, as indeed has also been
an offlist private reply from someone who has, thus far, not been a
participant in this thread.
Mr Verdy wrote:
You seem to have never seen how translation packages work and are used
in common projects (not just CLDR, but you could find them as well in
Wikimedia projects, or translation packages for lot of open source
packages).
What seems to be the case to Mr Verdy is in fact the actual situation.
I do not satisfy the second of the two conditions of the invitation to
join the working group. I am, in fact, retired and I have never worked
in the i18n/l10n industry. Also, from the explanations it is not as
close to my research interests as I had thought, and indeed hoped. I
just do what I can on my research project from time to time using a home
computer, a personal webspace hosted by an internet service provider,
some budget software, mainly High-Logic FontCreator, and Serif PagePlus
desktop publishing package, together with the software bundled with
Windows 10. Older people are often advised to try to keep the mind
active, so my research activity at least does that. If the research
itself has benefits more generally in making progress in the application
of information technology then that is an additional benefit.
One thing that of which you might like to take account and specifically
"build-out" in computer formatting is a tendency that can occur in some
computer systems software and also in everyday transactions also before
computers became widespread, namely of not allowing a person to be
recorded or listed with more that two initials before his or her
surname, to the extent that some people even have a practice of not
using more than two initials even when the document, such as a letter,
or a form, before them specifically uses three or more initials. Common
explanations are that "It's for the computer" and "Two initials is
enough to identify someone" and "Someone could have many names". Yet the
second is not true and the first is only because somewhere along the
line someone has decided that that is how it to be done: the third is
true, but the fact that that is the person's name on his or her birth
certificate is the legal fact of the matter and so needs to be properly
accommodated in systems recording names. Also, the United Kingdom and
United States format of a given name, one or more additional given
names, then a surname is not suitable for some other cultures. I
remember some registration forms for college courses that would ask for
surname and forenames, with a panel for each, together with a printed
note on every such form "If your name cannot be expressed in that
format, please write your whole name in the box labelled 'surname'".
However, with localization there are other issues. I seem to remember
somewhere that people whose name is correctly expressed in a script
other than Latin script often have a transliterated "Romanized form" of
their name as well for use on travel documents. So will your format
system include provision for this please, such as by allowing both to be
linked together in a document please?
Another feature is that I have known people from various countries who
have, in everyday use, chosen to be known in everyday workplace
situations by an English first name rather than their official given
name, while using their original surname, perhaps transliterated. So it
would be good if the name format accounts for that too please, in a
manner that does not give the possible impression of that use being for
some questionable purpose. Maybe a new term such as ChosenSocialName
could be used for that please.
An interesting facet of transliteration is that the name of a famous
mathematician whose name was properly written using Cyrillic characters,
was transliterated into English as Chebyshev, whereas the set of
polynomials named after him are each designated by including the letter
T. The transliteration of the name of the mathematician into German
starts with a T rather than the C used in English. There was a short
thread that explored within it this topic in this mailing list around
the year 2000, not necessarily in the year 2000 itself, but I have not
been able to locate it.
William Overington
Tuesday 14 January 2020
