On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 01:19:29PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote:
As a linguist, I am aware that incorrect forms of words can be
variants in some use.
As a linguist, I and 200 million of my native English-speaking
brethren
Steve, I am a native speaker of English, and I lecture in English.
Otherwise I would not make recommendations on English.
That's fine, according to wikipedia I left you several hundred
other million
native English speakers that you can use for other arbitrary
appeals to
authority if you'd like. >:)
It would only waste time if we compared different dictonaries and
got into
research papers.
Yes, it would.
Quite frankly, I consider that the translators' problem, not the
maintainers'. It is quite reasonable to constrain source English
strings
with style rules concerning consistent use of vocab, forms of
address, and
UI references because these are rules that benefit the primary
audience of
the string: the user. Subsetting the language for the benefit of
translators, OTOH, is a misoptimization which impoverishes the user
experience and deprives the translators themselves of opportunities
for
enrichment.
I don't think making translators look up variants of loan words is
useful. In my experience of translation projects, loan words in
general are often misunderstood, causing an incorrect translation.
The GNOME developer's choice to spell "né" as "ne" confused nearly
all the translators, and wasn't recognized even by the French
translators.
Er, this isn't at all analogous. The *feminine* form "née"/"nee"
exists in
English, because it's used to denote the maiden name of married
women --
since there is no tradition in the English speaking world of men
changing
their surnames, there is no corresponding masculine form in common
use.
This makes "ne" a misspelling (of either the English or the French,
take
your pick), not a variant, whereas it's easy to find "nee" with or
without
accent in an English dictionary.
Oh, entertainingly, m-w.com does list "né", but unlike for "née" and
"voilà", it doesn't recognize an accentless variant. <shrug> While
I might
get it into my own head to be clever enough to use a masculine form in
English, I wouldn't rely on an English dictionary to support such a
usage
anyway. For that matter, I don't really care very much for m-w.com
as a
dictionary, but that's beside the point -- namely, that there is
not Debian
standard dictionary for English and you're not likely to get one
when there
are hundreds or thousands of native speakers involved in the
project who
each have their own local language preferences. Yes, we should avoid
unrecognizable spellings that are incomprehensible to translators,
but do
you really think any translator is going to have trouble finding
"voila" in
a dictionary?