Re: sr Latn vs desktop files

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mån 2003-05-19 klockan 15.56 skrev Alexander Larsson:
> I just noticed the new sr Latn locale when i was building rpms of
> Nautilus 2.2.4.

Yes. "sr Latn" in this case denotes Serbian with latin script. Serbian
with cyrillic script, which is reportedly more commonly used, is denoted
by the language code only; "sr".

This designation issue was discussed thoroughly on the gnome-i18n list
last month (see
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-April/msg00011.html and
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-April/msg00073.html
threads). The problem is that ISO 639-1 only assigns language codes, it
doesn't care about differences in scripts ("alphabets") used. Some
languages, like Serbian, can be, and are, used with more than one
script. So we need a naming scheme for distinguishing the Serbian
translations into the different scripts used.

Adding an encoding modifier to distinguish obviously doesn't help either
-- both cyrillic and latin scripts can be encoded with UTF-8. However,
adding a generic locale modifier after an @ sign is supported in locale
naming. In addition, there is a standards work in progress for
standardizing codes for different scripts (ISO 15924,
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso15924/), which currently assigns
the code "Latn" for latin script.

So we decided to put the use of these together and let "sr Latn" denote
Serbian with latin script.

The alternative that was used previously in GNOME was to use a
self-invented "language code" for Serbian with latin script; "sp".
However, such a hack is an abuse of the language code standard, and ugly
for several reasons. We didn't use it to denote a language per se, nor
was it an officially assigned ISO 639-1 language code, and things would
break horribly once such a language code really would be officially
assigned.

In that respect, using "sr Latn" was much more appealing, and was less
likely to break standards. However, I doubt the specific case of desktop
key names was considered. If the desktop spec doesn't support the
generic @ modifier, perhaps it needs to be modified to do that, or the
use of "sr Latn" to denote Serbian with latin script be revised.

Suggestions welcome.


Christian