At 05:10 PM 4/3/00 +0100, Nick Lamb <njl98r@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
