Re: New Locale Proposal

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine.Leca@renault.fr)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2000 - 12:53:59 EDT


Carl W. Brown wrote:
>
> I am sorry that my previous reply was so short, I was rushed. A bit of
> background:

AH...

I am sorry, I missed entirely your point on the first shot. I was believing
you intended a new design on the locale issue.

You can easily drop my comments, they usually do not apply to the problem you
are referring yourselves. I apologize for the confusion I caused.

Since I have to send this message, here are a few more comments on your notes.
Mostly for fun...

> From: Antoine Leca [mailto:Antoine.Leca@renault.fr]
> >Carl W. Brown wrote:
> >>
> >> The locale will consist of three parts:
> >>
> >> 1) A modified lower case RFC 1766bis language
> >>
> >> 2) An ISO 3166 country code
>
> >Can you allow for areas that are a little bigger ?
> >The first obvious case is the EU (but I believe it may soon become a
> >ISO 3166 code). Problematic cases also include the Arabic countries
> >and the Spanish America, where the unity of language conjugated with
> >the differences in countries create a long list of almots completely
> >virtual locales (that is, outside the need to tag monetary amounts,
> >these locales are non-informative). Same problem for French in
> >Africa and, to a lesser extend, English on wide areas on Earth.
>
> Good point. A combined South American Spanish is also a good starting point
> for a neutral Spanish dialect. I guess you can always use a 5-8 character
> language variant.

I guess this too, but I believe(d) standardization in this area may help.
Alas, this does not appear as the way we go.

As an European, I assume you meant "a neutral Hispanoamerican" above, i.e.
want to dissociate European Spanish from Hispanoamerican (note to non-Spanish
speakers: this holds a lot of sense).
"Neutral Spanish" already have a locale code, "es", no need here.

> On the other hand for a language like Portuguese you might want to use
> Brazilian Portuguese from Minas Gerais as a language neutral. This might be
> a case for your ISO 3166-2 codes Brazil is the major producer to T.V. and
> movies and influences the Portuguese language.

Sounds OK as far as I know, but I do not know Brazil's linguistic situation!

> I guess it is like taking
> California English as a standard, maybe resented but generally understood.

But this one is going funny. Here in France, "Californian English" (which we
usually call West Coast American English) is taken as the prototypical example
of the hard-to-understand American way of talking. Of course, persons in
contact with "real" Americans people know about Arizona or Texas or Ebonics
(no offence intended; insert you case here:--->) or X...; but the symbol is
represented with the "West Coast"...

Antoine



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