At 17:44 21-10-1999 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>One has nothing to do with the other.
John, I am talking about priorities here. I am not objecting against having
fictional alphabets, but let's solve real issues first.
Besides, I can just see the discussion here a couple of years down the road
when we realize we need to impose some artificial boundary as to which
fictional alphabet to include without having to go to 64 bits.
>Unicode is a character coding standard, not a culturally aware
>sorting standard.
Precisely. CH is a character in Slovak, no matter what any Anglocrat says.
>Without Unicode, the pressure to migrate Slovak to 8859-1 compatibility
>might eventually become irresistible.
Nonsense. There is an 8859 standard good enough for Slovak. If there
weren't, we'd create one. It is a glyph standard, but it does not pretend
otherwise.
We will not bastardize our language because some people think that
internationalization equals anglification. We have gone through much more
serious pressure from others in our history. All it managed to produce was
strong nationalism.
Alas, the whole concept of i18n is often made in an ivory tower. For
example, there is no way to create a Slovak LCC locale which would cover
the way we write dates. That is why we do not have an LCC locale for
Slovak. I looked into creating one, and concluded LCC is not for us.
Specifically, LCC wants us to list the names of months, and how to combine
them into a date. That's a no go. The names are in nominative, they are
used in dates in genitive. In case you wonder, we have seven cases in
Slovak, one more than Latin: Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative,
vocative, local, and instrumental. The vocative case is pretty archaic in
Slovak, but quite modern in Czech.
Anyway, back to LCC dates. For example, March is "marec"; March 1, 1999, is
"1. marca 1999". If we were to go with LCC, we would have to spell the date
as "1. marec 1999" which we would read as "the first month of March in the
year 1999" as if there were more than one occurence of the MONTH of March
in the year 1999. Any software that would go that way would end up as
laughing stock in Slovakia. Its marketers would never figure out why they
can't sell it in Slovakia. The international software companies will be the
losers, not us. We have enough talent to write our own software.
Cheers,
Adam
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