> > So, probably, the hierarchical list of language preferences
> should be a
> > customizable part of the locale, as it is in fact in some
> environments.
>
> This still leads to problem.
> Neither you nor I would accept that our national language are tagged,
> respectively, la-ital and la-fran... ;-)
> Similarly, I believe Norwegians and Danes will not accept to
> have their
> present 2-letter codes replaced with cascaded ones in the form
> "Norse"-n? or "Norse"-da (replace "Norse" with the adequate code for
> the common root language of both language). And again and again.
>
> Also, what is the root language of Urdu? Is it Sanskrit, or
> Arabic, or Persian?
>
> Can of worms, can of worms...
I don't think this is what was intended. Since I am very interested
in this end of things, I'll give what I *think* was meant by a customizable
language hierarchy. For one instance, a Norwegian preferring bokmål (but
also fluent in english) could set up the following hierarchy (top to
bottom):
nb
no
nn
en
This would check first bokmål, then a generic norwegian locale
(which might be bokmål, but might not), then nynorsk (note that the
preference hierarchy is independent of any language or locale hierarchy,
which would have placed nb and nn as children of no - in fact, we should
probably refer to the language preference "stack"), and finally English if
no Norwegian pages are available (hmmm - "no no" in this case is not a
double negative :-). For those who think that such a system could be
incorporated into the current locale model, consider the language preference
stack that I would set up for myself:
en
es
zh_CN
jp
zh_TW
In my part of town, this is not a particularly unusual setup, yet my
locale is merely US, which tells all of nothing about my language
preferences (even English isn't guaranteed).
BTW, I've gotten confused during this thread over the naming of
country codes, etc. There are ISO specs, RFCs, POSIX specs (and more?)...
Is this information conveniently summarized anywhere so that I may
enlighten myself?
/|/|ike
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