Bug#444035: Reopening due to a revert
On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 07:44:16PM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> Even if Spanish itself does not include ã or õ, Portuguese does. And we
> live in an integrated world. Specially in Latin America, where the biggest
> country of the region is Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, not Spanish.
> It's very important for all of us to be able to write the characters of our
> neighbour countries.
>
> Take for example the case of the argentinian NIC service which from now on
> will allow domains with special characters: http://www.nic.ar/616, it not
> only allows the special characters for Spanish, but also the ones for
> Portuguese.
The link is http://www.nic.ar/616.html.
In case you don't understand spanish, it is (as Marga said) an official
resolution allowing the use of non-ascii characters for .ar domains. It
not only will allow spanish characters (ñ, á, é, í, ó, ú) but also
portuguese ones, on the basis of economic and social regional
integration.
> Most people complained about this because of habit more than because of
> real causes. Yet sometimes changes have to be made that mean that people
> have to get used to them, and eventually they'll be glad that the change
> was made.
To me, depriving the users of the possibility of writing portuguese
characters directly from their keyboards is a *very* serious bug.
Writing portuguese names and words is common practise, lots of schools
here in Argentina teach portuguese as a second or third language, and is
undoubtedly a very important language in our every day life.
Besides, Mercosur's importance is growing every day, and without the
tilde dead key we won't be able to write in either portuguese or guaraní
(Mercosur's official languages, beside spanish) with ease.
Another important point is that in the whole Paraguay and (at least) in
some provinces of Argentina, where spanish and latin-american keyboard
layouts are the most common, guaraní is an official language.
Guaraní alphabet includes the ã, ~e, ~g, ĩ, õ, ũ, and ~y (the ones of
the form ~[letter] are compositions that I'm unable to type). Without
the dead key, those can't be typed.
That means that, without a dead key, an official language in a region
where spanish and latin-amerincan keyboards are (by far) the most
common, can't be properly written.
I obviously understand the people who get annoyed by this change,
because it breaks a long term typing habit; but I think they are able to
get used to it without too much effort (there will be at least one
non-dead key anyway), and not having the tilde as a dead key has no
simple workaround (besides having some char map always open to
copy-paste from) and it is a very real social need.
Thanks,
Alberto
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