On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 08:49:16PM +0200, Stanislav Brabec wrote: > -- Other problem is about translating some splitted messages to many > languages (gender problems etc.) Example with Czech: > Free = Volny (Selection) > Free = Volna (Curve) > Brush = Stetec (Brush as tool) > Brush = Stopa (Brush as stroke) Later in the thread (on Apr 03, 05:10PM +0100), Nick Lamb replied with: > Anyway, expecting everyone to support translation catalogs just so > that you can hack around bizarre grammatical features in some > languages is a bit much. You call adjectives and articles with gender "bizzare grammatical features"? I may not be fluent in any language but en_GEEK, but I know that such use of gender in many other languages is in no way bizzare or obscure, and that getting it wrong is one of the fastest ways to get yourself flagged as a careless foreigner who does not have enough respect for the language to speak it properly. And you expect nouns and verbs which happen to be spelled the same way in English to be so in other languages? They're entirely different parts of speech! Just because we have fallen into a habit of verbing nouns dosen't mean that other languages work the same way. Switching from anglo-centric to Linux-centric, I don't know what the status of catalouge support on other platforms is at the moment, but it seems to have quite wide support under Linux these days, so installing an English catalouge seems like a reasonable option. And if you should choose to ./configure --disable-nls, well, just think of "Free#m" as another spelling of "colour". If it wouldn't kill the coder's will to do documentation entirely, I'd advocate all strings be written in some less-ambigious language like Lojban. But I think that'll have to wait until the majority of the developers are members of the logical language group ;) Love, Kevin -- Kevin Turner <acapnotic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> | OpenPGP encryption welcome here
