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Re: makedic package description



Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> At first glance I found that the German description was reasonable and thought
> that "kanadic" was a misspelling. As this is not the case, I suggested to change
> the wording and hopefully make its perception less error-prone.
> 
> I CC debian-l10n-english as Wikipedia puzzled me a bit (1). Until today I was
> convinced that language names always start with capital letters. How is the
> capitalization of scripts?

It's debatable.  I was taught *not* to capitalise script-names
("ogham", "devanagari", "hieratic") unless they're named after things
that are themselves capitalised in English ("Braille", "Greek", "Old
Persian").

On the other hand, some official sources (such as
("http://unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html";) seem to treat
individual writing systems as automatically capitalised in English.

These two conventions collide most obviously for Japanese "[Kk]anji",
"[Hh]iragana", and "[Kk]atakana", with the added twist that it's not
clear whether "[Kk]ana" gets to count as a script in its own right or
whether it's just a general category like "hieroglyphs".

>  Package: kdrill
[...]
> -Description: kanji drill and dictionary program
> - Offers lot of options like guessing kanji, guessing meaning, by grade
> - or even from a selected kanji list. You can even practice your kana.
> - A kanjidic is essential to run this program although you can specify your
> - own dictionary on the command line.
> +Description: Kanji drill and dictionary program
> + Offers lot of options like guessing Kanji, guessing meaning, by grade
> + or even from a selected Kanji list. You can even practice your Kana.
> + A Kanji dictionary is essential to run this program although you can
> + specify your own dictionary on the command line.

The first sentence isn't a sentence, but more importantly this is
extremely unclear about what the software is *for*.  Without that
context, the list of "options" is borderline gibberish.  Frankly I'd
suggest throwing the whole thing out and replacing it with some basic
introductory text stolen from http://www.bolthole.com/kdrill/:

    This package provides a graphical program for learning Japanese
    characters, which also doubles as a dictionary lookup program. It
    requires a kanji dictionary, although you can specify a custom one
    on the command line.

>  Package: makedic
[...]
>  Description: dictionary compiler for KDrill
>   makeedict is the program to help you make custom dictionary file for
> - KDrill. In particular, this is the program use to create the kanadic
> - drill files.
> + KDrill. In particular, this is the program use to create the Kana
> + dictionary drill files.

This still has grammar errors, but more importantly it's unclear what
it's trying to say.  Does makedict create dictionary files (meaning
wordlists), drill files, or both, or what?  I would guess:

    This package provides a program to create custom dictionary files for
    KDrill. It can also generate kana dictionary drill files.
  
>  Package: kanadic
[...]
>  Description: katakana and hiragana drill files for KDrill
> - Those files let you practice your basics katakana and hiragana with kdrill.
> - It includes both the basic version and the extended versions.
> + These files let you practice your katakana and hiragana basics with KDrill.
> + It includes both the basic and the extended version.

    This package provides files for practicing katakana and hiragana with
    KDrill. It includes basic and extended versions of each list.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package


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