[Techtalk] Internationalization issues

[caitlyn at mizuhoradio.com]

> On Monday 19 January 2004 15:52, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
>> In my Welsh dictionary, "addas" comes
>> after "adnabod", because "dd" is a letter in between "d" and "e".
> Just to mention it, while there's some sort of excuse, this odd beast
> is  what makes up the last two bytes of my name. Pronounced "th" (as in
>  "the"). So now you know :-P

Which is probably why people get your gender wrong online.  That's Meredith
in English, right?

FWIW, the TV series "Firefly" (a personal favorite, can't wait for the
movie) had a man named Jayne and he was the hired muscle.

Hebrew and Yiddish have a number of issues that haven't been covered in the
internationalisation/localisation discussion.  In Hebrew you normally just
write or print the letters, none of which are vowels.  (Something almost in
common with Welsh???)  Anyway, you get the vowels just because you know
which word it is from context.  This, in theory, makes it very hard to learn
written Hebrew.

Actually, vowels can be expressed as nekudot -- generally dots and other
small symbols around the characters.  Nekudot are used when teaching Hebrew,
in some references (i.e.: dictionaries), in "easy Hebrew" texts/websites,
and, of course, in prayer books.

Yiddish is similar, but not the same as Hebrew.

Speaking of prayer books, just about the entirety of Jewish scripture is put
to music.  Seriously.  Listen to a Torah reading at a synagogue.  The cantor
SINGS the passage.  Therefore, for religious text, you need cantillation
marks (basically musical directions) as well.  More little things to put
around characters.

So... if you needed to do comprehensive Hebrew and Yiddish support for a
browser, a word processor, etc... you have a lot more than the basic 23
characters of the aleph bet to worry about, not to mention the fact that
it's all written right-to-left.  For something like KDE or Gnome menus, help
screens, etc.. you don't need to worry about nekudot or cantillation marks,
of course.

I guarantee you these issues aren't unique to languages using the Hebraic
script (Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic, some other dead Middle Eastern languages).
 I just don't know how things might work in Arabic or Farsi or ????

I'm good at adding complexity, aren't I?

All the best,
Cait