On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 00:34, Christian Perrier wrote: --snip-- > > Yep. If you ask a linguist (scientist specializing in languages), s/he will > > most likely tell you that there is only one language, with *very* slightly > > different dialects, but with two different alphabets. (Traditionally > > "Croatian" used the Latin alphabet and "Serbian" used the Cyrillic > > alphabet.) Incidentally, the language code for this language is "sh". The > > separate "hr" and "sr" codes are entirely due to politics. :-P This is mostly correct, however Croatian and Serbian do have a rather different vocabulary. I would venture to say that the differences between Croatian and Serbian are as distinct as those between Serbian and Macedonian, it's just that through 50 years of Serbo-Croatian usage, enough words have become familiar enough to make understanding Croatian much easier. But as far as translations go, I think that even without a political reason, it's important to have both. While most Croats could certainly read a Serbian or Bosnian translation, it would be nice if they could read a native Croatian one. > However, with such choice, we break from the iso-639 standard (where > sh does not exist...or does not exist anymore). And we probably jump > into a lot of political problems again....I'm enough with political > problems, you know...:-) > > The statu-quo remains preferrable to me: > > -sr==Serbian > -bs==Bosnian > -hr (no translator yet)==Croatian I definitely agree here. If we HAD to cut it down to two, I would suggest cutting out either Serbian or Bosnian and leaving in Croatian. Luckily, since we already have translators for Bosnian and Serbian, this isn't necessary unless the installer gets into trouble due to too many languages. > We maybe need a way to distinguish between Cyrillic written and Latin > written Serbian......or indicate in some way that "Bosnian" is very > close to Latin-written Serbian. I don't believe this to be necessary. The only people who could benefit from such a distinction are people who wouldn't be able to read the translations anyway. Anyone living anywhere in the former Yugoslavia will know exactly what's meant by "Bosnian", "Serbian", and "Croatian". The only post-war difference is that it's now politically correct to say "Bosnian", "Serbian", and "Croatian", while, before the war, it was politically correct to say "Serbo-Croatian (Latin)" and "Serbo-Croatian(Cyrillic)". > sr : Serbian (Cyrillic written) > bs : Bosnian (close to Latin written Serbian) > > ...or whatever will sound appropriate and not offending to anyone by > concerned translators (probably not easy....) See above. This would only benefit people who couldn't read the translations anyway. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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