Gwich'in (was: Re: language tag en-cutspell)
Doug Ewell
dewell at adelphia.net
Sat Jun 24 20:20:33 CEST 2006
Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at comhem dot se> wrote:
> Ok, I’d like to avoid the ASCII apostrophe since that is NEVER the
> proper spelling, just a fallback spelling.
This is far too pedantic IMHO.
I already conceded defeat on the issue of ASCII fallbacks for accented
letters, such as "Cote" and "Bokmal". I'm sorry that we couldn't see
eye-to-eye on the issue Richard Ishida raised, that search engines --
either sophisticated ones like Google or simple ones like Notepad --
might be able to match "Cote" to "Côte" and vice versa, but will never
match either to "Côte" which is what the Registry has (like it or
not).
On the issue of apostrophes, however, I agree strongly with John Cowan.
Characters like U+2019 and U+02BC are indeed "preferred" over U+0027 for
certain functions, but to say that U+0027 is NEVER the proper spelling
is going too far. Other members of this list are arguing that the
correct character is U+02BC. What non-Unicode character set has that
character? What keyboard does it appear on? What is the harm in
including it as a fallback spelling for users who can't type it and
can't see it on their screen?
> I don’t mind using it in emails... But I really like to avoid getting
> that someone comes to the conclusion that “The mark functions and
> should be processed as an apostrophe ('), not as a right single
> quote (’).” (though it’s an apostrophe, it’s not THAT
> apostrophe).
See, but according to Michael and John and others, U+2019 is apparently
not the "correct" character either. This is where we've gotten
ourselves by heading down the "proper spelling" path.
> Furthermore, I don’t quite understand the remark someone made: “Bad
> move to add it just because it is an English translation.” (then in
> reference to “Ivory Coast”). For all of the Description fields one has
> taken the purportedly English name (though that isn’t true in all
> cases, for instance for ‘CI’) from the respective source standards.
> One as not picked up the French name (when different), nor the
> indigenous name (which is given for ISO language codes).
The situation with Côte d’Ivoire has been explained numerous times
already.
IIRC, the government of Timor-Leste has also asked that their nation be
called by that (Portuguese) name universally. The only reason this is
not an issue for us is that it contains no non-ASCII characters.
> And I don’t see any good reason for not correcting it first in the LS
> registry, and then petition for getting the spelling corrected in the
> ISO standards.
I have requested that this be done.
> PS
> I typed, directly, all punctuation above. No cut&paste or other
> workaround. (Ok, it’s not a “standard” keyboard layout for this OS,
> but it could be.)
And yet we expect everyone else who searches for things in the Registry
to employ such workarounds? I think you just provided your own
rebuttal.
--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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