Re: localization: What is a language

From: David Barnsdale (daividb2000_at_spamfree.yahoo.com)
Date: 11/24/04 

Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:19:40 GMT

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 02:18:17 +0000, Minderbinder wrote:

> Good question. As far as I know, the locale system in Linux falls back to
> the "C" locale, not English (such as en_US/en_UK), when there are no
> localised messages available for the preferred language. There does not
> seem to be a cascading system to allow graceful degradation as you
> describe. It is for this reason that I consider locale to be next to
> useless for bilingual/multilingual users, and in need of replacement.

There does seem to be a trend at the moment for languages
to fragment. Hence the number of "multilingual" people
will increase. When I asked my Croatian flatmate whether
he knew any foreign languages he said that ten
years ago he didn't know any but now he knew two, meaning
Bosnian and Serbian.
He was joking of course but that is exactly
the situation for a Linux user.

It's good to see that there are people
working on this problem.
A cascading system does seem to be the
most likely solution.

Thanks for the links.

David