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Re: Fwd: Re: [i18n] Mandrake 10 install



It's all the time the same problem: ppl whining like little children
about nothing (I don't meen you Nadim). Is mandrake your distro? let
them do what they want!
Is Arabic not included in MDK? Well it is... And no one REALLY cares
about having hebrew in European and American region. I installed many
MDK distros on my PC and other PCs and never cared about this...
Actually I never remarked it...

If you're not happy go make your own distro.

Arafat

Am Mi, den 05.05.2004 um 21:07 Uhr -0700 schrieb Nadim Shaikli:
> If anyone wants to reply - feel free.  I still don't understand why not
> simply list the languages alphabetical and simply group 'em as say
> 
>  A-H, I-P, Q-Z
> 
> or similar to avoid any political gray areas.  Oh well, I think my
> point/concerns have been voiced.
> 
> Salam.
> 
>  - Nadim
> 
> 
> 
> 	
> 		
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> Am Mi, den 05.05.2004 um 21:07 Uhr -0700 schrieb Nadim Shaikli:
> 
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Kaixo! On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 09:31:44PM -0700, Nadim Shaikli wrote: > > Yiddish is native from Europe, but nowadays there is more people > > using Yiddish from north America than from the native places in Europe. > > This sounds like a dangerous precedent - where do you draw the line > on which languages to include/exclude (based on population/usage > numbers, people's requests, personal preference ?) The rational is, in that order: - if a language has official status or official recognition in some country, then put it under the region that country is in. - if not, put it under the region where its native user base is, - in case the language spreads outside the native region in a way that the number of speakers outside the native region outnumber by several orders of magnitude those in the native region, add also other regions > I highly suggest > to simplify this entire thing and simply list languages alphabetically The problem is that the list has grown too big for doing that; breaking it into 5 main world regions allows to keep each region under 40-50 languages; otherwise the whole list could be 100-200 entries, which is hard to navigate. > (it would be logical to list the languages in english followed by the > native script in parenthesis to have a coherent listing). That was what we did previously; but the English spelling isn't consistent for all languages (in some cases they are quite different, eg: "Khmer" and "Cambodgian"). > > Arabic speakers are also present all around the world, but the main > > places where Arabic is used are (west-)Asia and (north-)Africa, so > > it is listed at those places. > > Again, I'm not sure about your definition of "main" as there are > very large populations that speak Arabic in Europe and the Americas. Are the number of Arabic speakers in America and Europe several orders of magnitude bigger than those in northern Africa and Asia? Is it to the point that almost nobody still spokes Arabic in the Middle-East, Arabic is no longer official nor recognized in any country and there isn't any signle Arabic web site hosted in the Middle-East they are all hosted in the USA? I doubt it. But that is the sittuation with Yiddish, the native speaking population in Europe almost disappeared, the few survivors in Europe usually don't speak it anymore. It is a quite unique situation. I could maybe remove it from America region however, I just think it would make sense. The other special case is Esperanto, which is listed on all regions, as it is actually a truly international language. > It looked out of place since its neither a native language (I didn't > see 'navajo indian' listed) Because I don't have any information on Navaho yet, nor have I seen any translation either (there are a few yi.po files). I don't even know what character set is needed to write in Navaho, nor how "Navaho" is written natively. If I had that info I would of course add support so that people can have LANGUAGE=nv working. Note however that Navaho spekers are still more important in North America than on any other place. > nor widely used (I didn't see Chinese > or Indian/Hindi listed as part of the Americas as well even though > there are huge populations in that region). But those populations don't significatively outnumber those in China and India. And Hindi is an official language in India; and Chinese is an official language in China. Some small languages, maybe Georgian or Armenian could be in that case, may have more speakers outside their respective countries, but they still have a country where they are official, which means a lot of real activity in that language: media (TV, radio, newspapers), governemental communication, school, etc. > I again, suggest you > simply list out all the languages with no regard to a particular > region else you run the risk of conducting such overly silly > conversations that really don't contribute to anything. That discussion already took place some time ago (when we split the list into regions). The reason is the list too long to be only one piece. It currently has 93 different languages, and a lot more would be added with time (I currently have 4 not yet listed ones on hold: Berber, Mandinka (both waiting to have native script support added to unicode), Furlan (that just started its translations a week ago) and Malagasy (translation activity hasn't started yet) Broke by regions it is: Europe: 50 (51 with Furlan) Asia: 36 Africa: 14 (16 with Berber, Mandinka and Malagasy) Oceania: 4 America: 7 Europe is almost complete, almost all official/native languages are already listed. Future growth will be mainly in Africa, and a bit in Asia. A lot of languages are still missing; in America region for example there are several native languages that are used that would probably be added in the future: Guarani, Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, Mapundungu, Inuktitut, Greenlandic, Yupik, Inupiak, Navaho,... In Africa region there is still missing: Tigrinya, Oromo, Swahili, Wolof, Berber, Malagasy, Kiniarwanda, Kirundi, Luanda, Mandinka,... and those are only the ones I rember from top of my head just now, there are much more. Of course they won't be all added in one day, it will take time; but it is not possible to have a single plain list if we want to include as many languages as possible (which we want). The list was already too big to be usable when we split it, it is bigger now with near 100 entries. A menu with 100 or more entries isn't manageable, it has to be split into smaller parts, and the five big world regions are the most easy and efficient I come with (a split by linguistic families won't be good as most people won't know the linguistic family of their language) > PS: what is noted above is entirely my personal views/opinions that > have have NOTHING to do with arabeyes (in case someone wants to > read more into this than there really is). Now, most languages are listed according to their official/native status; with two exceptions: Esperanto (which isn't official anywhere, nor is it native anywhere either, as it is an auxilliary language) and Yidish (which isn't official anywhere, and is probably the only language where most of the activity is done outside its native region). I could probably make Yidish listed only in Europe region; Yidish speaking people sure know it is a language native from central Europe. > Regards, > > - Nadim > > > > 	 > 		 > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs > http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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