About Serbian, Cyrillic and Latin script

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

I accidentally stumbled into a conversation with a Serbian, and got the 
enclosed update.....

it seems clear that a lot of people kind of wish that "sr" would mean 
"serbian in cyrillic script", but that this is more wishful thinking than 
otherwise yet.

Given such a situation, I see good reason to allow both "sr-Cyrl" and 
"sr-Latn" to be registered; it's easy to see situations where one wants to 
locate resources in one particular script, and situations where resources 
in either script would be acceptable.

Your mileage may vary :-)

                 Harald

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: lørdag, mai 10, 2003 17:21:15 +0200
From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
To: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>
Cc:
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [LC help/webmaster] Re: Your entry in the Linux 
Counter]


> (interestingly, I'm presently listening, on another mailing list, to a
> debate about whether Serbian is commonly, rarely or never currently
> written in Latin characters - what's your opinion?)

My opinion is - too oftenly. Today Serbian (and by 'Serbian' here I mean
only  about official language in Serbia) is commonly written with Latin
characters  (of course, not like I've sent you but with some iso-8859-2
characters as  well). But, hopefully, we're moving toward decreasing it's
use. To be exact,  for example, I know about an research which says that
about 75% high school  students using cyrillic script in everyday writing.
But on our portion of the  web probably only 5% of sites are in cyrillyc,
for obvious reasons. Yet when  Micro$oft tried to localise windows in latin
script only there was quite a  fuss over it, and Windows will come in both
scripts. Also, use of script  depends on use of text. All computer books
are published in Latin script, for  example. But all children, religious,
historical or national books are  published in cyrillic. Generally everyone
considers cyrillic the primary  script and uses Latin script only if there
is some special reason for it:  ease of use (on computers), ability to
export books/products to Croatia or  Bosnia, technical ability (most
courts, for example, are equipped only with  Latin typewriters!) and so on.

---------- End Forwarded Message ----------

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