On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 05:56:08PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> Bonjour,
>
> I am french and I don't regard the 'Imprimerie Nationale' rules as binding.
> We are still a free country.
>
> Do we have such standard document for the original english description ?
> No, and there is no dedicated team to review them.
This is not for lack of trying... People keep trying to tie
down the English language with an institution similar to
the one French has (the name of which I can't remember) but
it never sticks. Certain endeavours have English-language
manuals (Journalism, government writing come to mind) but,
as I understand it, there's no authority on English beyond
the Oxford, Webster's and Macquarie (and others I don't know)
Dictionaries for UK, US and Australian English.
On the other hand, what we want in Debian (I presume) is
"standard" {langauge} which is usually fairly easy to agree
upon. It's the most formal subset spoken by the most people,
I suspect. So in French I understand it's the form dictated
by the language institute in Paris who's name I have not
remembered since I started this email. In English I guess
you'd take the Harvard Dictionary of Style combined with
an appropriate dictionary? In Japanese it would be standard
Japanese (that was easy!) which is pretty much polite
Tokyo-speak, thanks to the agressive attempts of previous
Japanese governments to stamp out all other dialects. ;-)
I daresay the style choice for a given language should be
made by the people on the debian-l10n-{language} mailing
list. And the adhered to by writings in that language...
Presumably a webpage listing such documents would be a
good idea.
As a native English and poor Japanese speaker, this
discussion can only really be of academic interest to me
since Japanese's computer-typographical formatting seems
to have been massively influenced by US English, and so
doesn't present any interesting cases (off the top of my
head) to parallel a marked difference in writing quality
between comma-seperated lists and semicolon/newline
seperated lists apparent in French but not in English.
I think in English semicolons and commas also seperate
different things, but I'd have to go back and reread the
apache description before I can comment on which is correct
in English here.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, MCSE
6th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU
The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361)
Paul.Hampson@Anu.edu.au
Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did,
we'd be running around in darkened rooms, popping pills and
listening to repetitive music.
-- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989
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