Re: Debian Installer Keyboard choices
Samuel Thibault wrote:
> I've gone through all the keyboard layouts that we should support
> at installation time since we have enabled translations for the
> corresponding languages in localechooser, I end up with the following
> list of addition:
>
> Albanian
> Arabic
> Asturian
> Bengali
> Bhutanese
> Bosnian - Herzegovinian
If that's "of Bosnia-Herzegovina" then it shouldn't be spaced - it's
"Bosnian-Herzegovinian".
The country's standard name in English is "Bosnia and Herzegovina",
which doesn't seem to have an adjective form, but then again maybe
this is talking about the Bosnian-and/or-Herzegovinian language(s).
> Catalan
> Chinese
> Corean
Korean!
> Esperanto
> Ethiopian
> Georgian
> Gujarati
> Hindi
> Irish
(I'm surprised Irish needs its own keyboard layout...)
> Kannada
> Kazakh
> Khmer
> Kurdish
> Laotian
> Malayalam
> Nepali
> Northern Norwegian
Are you sure you mean "Northern"? The two standard forms of
Norwegian - Nynorsk and Bokmål - are split east/west rather than
north/south. If either of them is more "northern" I would have
thought it was Bokmål, except that surely that would have been the
*first* Norwegian entry on this list, not a late addition...
> Persian
> Punjabi
> Sinhala
> Tamil
> Telugu
> Vietnamese
>
> My question is now for debian-l10n-english: are these OK as keyboard
> layout names?
The general approach of using a mixture of national and linguistic
labels seems fine...
> We can typically use the adjective for the country and/or for the
> language: it happens that sometimes we need to designate the country
> (because there are various keyboards for the same language, depending on
> the country), and sometimes we need to designate the language (because
> there are several languages in the country, and thus various keyboard),
> but I'm wondering for the case when there is just one widespread
> language in just one country.
In theory it's even more confusing than this, because strictly
speaking it's not a matter of languages so much as writing systems.
If I decided to start writing everything in the Shavian alphabet
tomorrow, I'd still be using British English, but I'd need to switch
keyboard layouts. Fortunately this is academic given that all the
big-name scripts are known by the name of the language they're
designed for.
> For the record, the current list (a mixture of language and country
> adjectives) is:
>
> American English
> Belarusian
> Belgian
> Brazilian
> British English
(The difference between en_US and en_GB keyboards has nothing to do
with the language or even spelling-system differences - it's mostly a
matter of LC_MONETARY. But if we dropped the word "English" we'd be
opening a can of worms with the label "American".)
> Bulgarian
> Canadian French
> Canadian Multilingual
> Croatian
> Czech
> Danish
> Dutch
> Dvorak
(Another kind of odd-man-out.)
> Estonian
> Finnish
> French
> German
> Greek
> Hebrew
> Hungarian
> Icelandic
> Italian
> Japanese
> Kirghiz
> Latin American
Do Brazilians get a three-way choice of "Brazilian", "Latin American",
and "Portuguese"? Or do those layouts really mean pt_BR, es_NON-ES,
and pt_PT?
> Latvian
> Lithuanian
> Macedonian
> Norwegian
> Polish
> Portuguese
> Romanian
> Russian
> Serbian (Cyrillic)
> Slovakian
> Slovene
> Spanish
> Swedish
> Swiss French
> Swiss German
> Thai
> Turkish
> Ukrainian
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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