Variant subtag proposal: Høgnorsk variety of Norwegian

[Leif Halvard Silli]

Michael Everson, Sat, 2 Jan 2010 10:52:22 +0000:                   
> On 2 Jan 2010, at 03:15, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> 
>> So now, at least OS X 10.5 has two tags which, in Apple's book,  
>> means  'Bokmål': 'no' and 'nb'. The exact same version of a particular
>> application will be flagged as 'Norwegian' in 10.4 but as 'Bokmål'  
>> in 10.5.
> 
> That would be a bug, I should think... where do you find this?

Where? In Mac OS X 10.5. If you have Mac OS X 10.6, then you can check 
it is the same there - I have not upgraded yet. (I think Thorgeir has 
10.6 - perhaps he can check.) Are you in a position to get the correct 
understanding through to Apple?

It is is simple to check. Here is one way to do it:

1. Select an application in Finder - for example TextEdit.
2. Select the shortcut <Cmd-I> - or select 'Show info' - 
   in the File menu - you get an info panel.
3. Click the 'Language' field/button in the info panel -
   you get to see a list of the languages the application
   is localized in.

If you were testing the Norwegian localization of Mac OS X, you would 
then see a language labeled simply "Bokmål" in that list. In the 
English localization, it is labeled as "Norwegian Bokmål".

Now if control click on the application (TextEdit) icon and select the 
context menu "Show package content" [or whatever it is called in 
English], then you can navigate to the Resources folder - where you 
will find the folder 'no.lproj'. If you change that name to e.g. 
'sv.lproj', then it will be listed in the info panel as 'Swedish'. You 
get the picture.

Now, if you toggle between calling it 'no.lproj' or 'nb.lproj', then 
you can see that whatever you do, it is listed in the info panel as 
'Bokmål'/'Norwegian Bokmål'. You can also try changing the name to 
'nn.lproj' - it then get listed as Nynorsk.

There are several more issues related to this: Most Nynorsk users 
expect to be able to get as much as possible in Nynorsk, but that else 
- wherever in life - things "falls back" to Bokmål. However, in OS X, 
if I select Nynorsk as preferred language, then everything labeled as 
'nb' or 'no' is ignored - unless I am an conscious activist kind of guy 
(?) who manually select Bokmål as secondary language in the system's 
language preference settings. 

All this has been reported to Apple - in several bugs. Reminds me: I 
should probably check their status once more.
-- 
leif halvard silli