xx-XX-nnnn vs. xx-nnnn in Chinese and German
Torsten Bronger
bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de
Thu, 14 Feb 2002 02:24:28 +0100
Am Donnerstag, 14. Februar 2002 00:12 schrieben Sie:
> At 21:57 +0100 2002-02-13, Torsten Bronger wrote:
> >I need de-AT/DE for the mapping on LaTeX identifiers. LaTeX has to
> >distinguish, because it generates some text. E.g. the date: "Januar" in
> >Germany, "Jänner" in Austria. So if I write a letter in XML which is
> >converted to LaTeX which then puts in the date -- the country of origin
> >is essential.
>
> The spelling of January in date formats is a locale issue not a
> language tagging issue.
Granted, but it's convenient to include this into the language tag.
I mean, nobody would write a letter in Austrian with German date. As
would nobody write "neighbour" and "color" in the same text.
> You can already use de_AT and de_DE for that,
> and indeed that is recommended. Are there other differences common
> enough to warrant a language tag?
>
> de-AT and de-DE are legal according to the RFC anyway, as are en-GB
> and en-US and en-IE.
I knew that, and I use them already. For them, I'd have never
requested something in this mailing list.
Okay, to make it more concrete: My typesetting system, LaTeX, uses
UKenglish, USenglish, german, austrian, ngerman and naustrian.
That's what I have to cope with, I didn't invent them. In my
authoring system, an XML application, I have the xml:lang attribute.
What I need is a subjective mapping, i.e. every LaTeX identifier must
be reached.
I thought it was sensible to try to do this using *only* xml:lang.
With the proposed tags, I could encode:
en, en-US --> USenglish
en-GB --> UKenglish
de-1901, de-DE-1901 --> german
de, de-DE, de-DE-1996, de-1996 --> ngerman
de-AT-1901 --> austrian
de-AT, de-AT-1996 --> naustrian
(Or try to find better defaults by heuristic methods, but that's
another thing.)
That was my whole motivation for the requests.
Do I abuse xml:lang here?
Bye,
Torsten.