Re: Yoruba and Hausa language support
Hi Christian!
Sorry for the late reply, I forgot to mention CC and the ML index
weren't updated since Friday. Now they do.
>> Language codes for both are ISO-639-3?. Yoruba seems do be
>> "latin-based with three addidional characters" and should be
>> Webbook(whatever this is), a sample alphabet can be found here[4].
>> Hausa[5], even worse, "has both a standardized Romanized (Latin) and
>> an Arabic orthography." and "Webbook, with modifications". aargh ..
>> help!
>> So, where I can't find suitable fonts in Debian? :-)
>>
>> [4] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/yoruba.htm
>> [5] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hausa.htm
>>
>>
>> Further, a apt-cache search on ISO-639 gave me iso-codecs:
>> _._. .._ _ .... . ._. . __..__ _._. .._ _ .... . ._. .
>> Description: ISO language, territory, currency codes and their
>> translations
>> This package provides the ISO-639 Language code list, the
>> ISO-4217 currency list, the ISO-3166 Territory code list,
>> and ISO-3166-2 sub-territory lists.
>> .
>> It also (more importantly) provides their translations in .po form.
>> _._. .._ _ .... . ._. . __..__ _._. .._ _ .... . ._. .
>>
>> If I get this right, this will be sufficient for console usage?
>> Something like LANG=??_yo.ISO-639-? and ??_ha.ISO-639-? resp.
>> dpkg-recofigure locales?
>
> Not exactly. For both languages to be supported in applications, you
> first need a locale file for them.
Thx for the explanation. I already crawled cluelessly through a thousand
links. I think I now got it. :-)
As I'm totaly unaware about Yoruba, Hausa or Igbo or any other african
language, I'll have to cede this to somebody who has. Luckily I already
got reply from Wazobia Linux, and they are that kind to help where they
can. They also have translated about 70% of Gnome ond KDE yet. This will
go into the main branch then.
> Writing a locale file needs the knowledge of:
>
> -writing locale files..:-)
About time, currency, special characters and such stuff to
/usr/share/i18n/locales
> -the language
sorry, no. :-)
> -the country (a locale is a combination of parameters for a language
> and a country)
The last part of eg. yo_NG and also to /u/s/i18n/locales I assume.
> The iso-codes package you mentioned will not help. It is just a list
> of ISO standards about language names (ISO-639), country names
> (ISO-3166) and currency names (ISO-4217). The package provides
> translations of these information in many languages, but that's all.
>
> Yoruba has a ISO-639_2 code: "yo"
>
> Hausa has "ha"
>
> So the first locales should be yo_NG for "Yoruba/Nigeria" and ha_NG
> for "Hausa/Nigeria".
>
> To learn about locale files, you can have a look at files in
> /usr/share/i18n/locales.
Yeah, can't find them there. Do you know some description/howto about
adding locales to Debian? Even if about 75% of spoken languages will
disapear till 2050 I think adding Joruba, Hausa and Igbo to Debian won't
hurt. :-)
I think I can get relevant files from the Wazobia people. At least for
Console support.
> Fonts indeed come way after this....:)
Ok, I see. I fear my knowledge on this is far to little to do it myself
;-)
thank you,
sl ritch
Reply to: