Hello > > It is one thing to find full internationalisation support in a language such as python > > (slow batteries included), but what about minorities such tcl, lua, m4 or > > sed ? > > I have Lua covered. I can't say for the others (other than, you really > use m4? You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din). So I do use m4 - it can be quite nifty to generate latex fragments, but that is because latex doesn't play as nicely with pipes as (g)roff where one can just stream things in... m4 doesn't strike me as that special ? Prolog and postscript felt far more exotic to me, and web servers have been written in the latter... > I have to deal with the telephony network at work. It *is* the OSI seven > layer burrito [1] and even *there* there are baked in assumptions relating > to i18n [2]. Text is limited to ASCII. Yup. 7-bit US-ASCII it all its > glory. Anything else requires some very nasty hacks. Note how the global telephone system has made it into the furthest corners of the planet - arguably further than the internet, and did so without worrying about internationalisation relating to their URL equivalents (phone numbers)... > > But even the layer just below that (the competent user level) this starts > > leaking. A gemini url starts with "gemini://" - that is ascii text, and > > even funnier, taken from latin. If a non-english user is confused by > > english (nay, latin, with no native speakers at all) words, then surely > > "gemini://" has to be rewritten as "tweling://" or "zwilling://" or > > whatever farsi, japanese or mongolian use for "twin". If not, then an full > > ascii text url should be manageable too... an url is primarily a computer > > address. > > Sushi comes from Japanese, gesundheit from German, sauna from Finnish, > smorgasbord from Swedish, borscht from Russian and ketchup from China, > what's your point? The insinuation was that internationalised URLs are essential because people who don't speak english at all might not be able to comprehend or (if their input system is sufficiently different) generate ascii/latin text. And my argument is that this doesn't make sense, as every gemini url starts with "gemini://" which is ascii text in a language that nobody speaks anymore. And if people can manage to type "gemini://" then a bit more ascii in the hostname or even path should be quite manageable too even for "people who use scripts like arabic, chinese, devanageri, etc." to quote another list participant. A pity that I failed to convey this point properly - you and I (and bie, and some others) have had a very similar conversation on the 7th and 9th of this month (under the subject "IDN with Gemini"), where I tried to explain my position that I view as a language as a communications protocol and not the property of an ethnicity or nation. The desire to be inclusive is good, but we are deferential to pretty recent concept/meme - the monolingual nation state, which is say 200 or 300 years old. Before that (at least in europe, but elsewhere too) each little region had pretty strong regional dialect or even language (limited mobility or literacy allows for rapid linguistic drift). People who were educated spoke a second or third language to interact with the clergy or the palaces far away. In this regard having people know learn a new language to interact with the internet isn't that much of an imposition, but a return to the way things were... just scaled up to the size of the planet. > All those are perfectly cromulent (from Simpsons) words. > Modern English sucks up words from all other languages. Older english does too: That's why a dead cow is beef. All languages do, absent a (religious or state-sponsored) authority enforcing a level of purity aka stasis. Living languages evolve. > But yes, there have been several such localizations in the past for > various [programming] languages but they never caught on internationally > for some reason. Isn't that yet another hint ? That the point of a language is to communicate, not to serve as a barrier, despite the machinations of nationalists ? regards marc
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