From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Feb 28 2006 - 22:52:38 CST
From: "Donald Z. Osborn" <dzo@bisharat.net>
> Alberto Escudero-Pascual and Louise Berthilson of IT46+ are refining a locale
> generator tool, and as part of giving some feedback to them on it there are
> several questions that I wanted to raise with the Unicode community (as the
> Consortium manages CLDR).
>
> 1. What if a group has a calendar not yet provided for in the locale format? We
> have several cases where there are different week lengths (Igbo and some other
> groups use 4-day traditional week; Bamileke have an 8-day traditional week;
> there are some smaller groups in Togo that have 5 or 6 day weeks; there are
> others). Generally these exist alongside the 7-day week used worldwide, which
> may complicate the issue.
Threre are even more complicate cases, with weeks of variable duration, for example aligned on lunar or solar months, or aligned with religious or honorific events. They would complicate the computing of week days because it's not a simple modular residue from a count of days.
Some example would be the old Roman weeks, with specialdays like calendes, nones and ides.
May be they could be treated like other religious dates and holidays or national days. The CLDR only allows translating them, without describing how they are computed or assigned, but it seems that this part of the resources is used to designate only yearly events; could it be extended and used to translate events that occur more often such as days in those special weeks (nothing seems to prevent this in the current CLDR schema)?
This could be applied as well to translate as well the names of saints that appear on many western calendars.
Another example is the French revolutionar calendar that tried to introduce decades (weeks of 10 days) with even less success than the yearly calendar.
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