From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Sep 16 2005 - 06:17:43 CDT
On 16/09/2005 10:36, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>
>
> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>
>
>>> And what language would "eu" be ???
>>
>
>> Is this a trick question? The code "eu" means the Basque language
>> (euskara).
>
>
> Not a trick question - when Elsebeth <eflarup@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >This would only happen if we were to create a new
> >locale (eu_EU) and force everybody in the euro zone
> > to adopt that.
>
> I thought that by "eu_EU" she was suggesting "European language",
> Europe locale. Foolishly I forgot that "eu" was the code for Basque
> language.
>
And I thought you were suggesting that Basque be promoted as a common
European language! It makes a lot of sense really: the only European
language surviving (west of the Caucasus, at least) from really ancient
times, before we nasty Aryans invaded from the east and imposed our
Indo-European languages. Also Basque belongs to no one single country,
and will be equally difficult to learn for everyone, except for the
rather few real Basques. ;-)
More seriously, Jukka wrote:
> There are few localization-relevant things that can be reasonable
> described as belonging to a form of a language as spoken in a
> particular country, as opposite to the language as a whole.
But he seems to have forgotten the issue of spellings. There are
significant and well known differences between the spelling of British
and American English, and some other countries have their own partially
distinct spelling conventions - e.g. Australia mostly follows British
spellings but for some reason uses the American spelling of "labor".
German spelling conventions e.g. in use of ß vary from country to
country. There are country-related issues in French e.g. that "octante"
(80) and "nonante" (90) are acceptable in Belgium and Switzerland but
not in France, and there are different accentuation rules in Canada.
Other country-related issues are the forms of dates. In the USA the
month comes before the day, in the UK the day comes before the month.
This ordering may be language-independent (what do US Spanish speakers
and UK Welsh speakers do?) but still needs to be indicated in the
locale. And the precise form is both language and country dependent
because the month names are language dependent.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.0/103 - Release Date: 15/09/2005
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