Gwich'in (was: Re: language tag en-cutspell)

[Doug Ewell]

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 "C&#xF4;te" 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 (&#x0027;), not as a right single 
> quote (&#x2019;).” (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/