On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 01:24, Christian Perrier wrote:
> (Alex Malinovic, serbian tanslator, and Safir Secerovic, bosnian
> translator, CC'ed. Please keep CC unless one of both mentions he's
> subscribed to -boot)
Thanks for putting this note up. I am, in fact, not subscribed to -boot,
and if I did my mail server would most likely cry. :) (Note: In English,
I prefer Malinovich for the sake of proper pronunciation.)
> > This is interesting. Serbians prefer Cyrillic in their everyday life
> > (books, papers, etc.), however I have the impression that in computers
> > they use only the Latin alphabet with ISO-8859-2. (Officialy both
This is mostly an issue of convenience. There has been little in the way
of Cyrillic support, and since all people from the former Yugoslavia can
read and write both Cyrillic and Latin, there was little NEED for
Cyrillic support. I have a feeling this will change due to politics.
> > alphabets can be used to write Serbian.) I think XFree doesn't have
> > proper keyboard support for Serbian Cyrillic (this is easy to fix though).
I'm not sure where the distinction between Gnome and XFree keyboard
support lies (if there is any), but using the keyboard applet and
switching to Serbian Cyrillic works just fine, including giving me a
standard Serbian key layout.
> We can also notice that we currently have "Bosnian" (bs) as one of d-i
> languages. From what I have retained from exchanges with Alex, Bosnian
> is indeed the serbian language as spoken in Bosnia and
> Herzegovina.....the current translation by Safir Secerovic (sorry for
> special characters....I currently have no way for inputting them) uses
> Latin alphabet.
> > Serbians live also in Bosnia and Croatia. Only 10 years ago there was
> > only one language named "Serbocroatian" (or sometimes "Croatoserbian")
> > but I suppose that Serbians in Croatia and Bosnia will prefer their
> > language to be named Serbian rather than Croatian or Bosnian.
This was the 'official' language. In fact, there has ALWAYS been a
distinct Croatian dialect. Serbian and Bosnian are a different issue,
since the only real differences are in the pronunciation of 'j' sounds
in some words. ('ekavski' vs 'ijekavski') Given the current political
situation, I definitely agree that it is best to have all three
independent languages listed.
> So, but I may be wrong, we could have two different kinds of serbian
> (or serbian-like) languages in d-i :
>
> "serbian" (sr) being cyrillic-written serbian
> "bosnian" (bs) being latin-written "serbian"
>
> Besides some political feelings (I'm pretty sure thay will arise some
> day), this seems a quite good choice.
As long as they are labeled as "Serbian" and "Bosnian" I don't think
there will be a problem. Speaking as a Bosnian born-and-raised Serb,
Serbs prefer Cyrillic primarily out of pride, and Bosnians prefer Latin
because it's not Cyrillic. :)
> > We have three options for the second stage:
> >
> > 1. use the locale sr_YU.UTF-8@cyrillic. UTF-8 is a must because
> > people will need to use the Sebian Latin alphabet.
> >
> > 2. use sr_YU. This locale is for ISO-8859-2. I think this is the
> > most popular option in Serbia and Montenegro. The console has to be
> > a Latin console.
> >
> > 3. use sr_YU.UTF-8. Like 2. but allows to use Cyrillic.
>
> I have used the first choice, but Alex may disagree.
I definitely agree. I am a strong supporter of UTF whenever possible.
ISO-8859 is, in my opinion, quickly becoming obsolete.
--
Alex Malinovich
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