Re: Greek: GR or EL? Czech: CZ or CS? UK: Ukrainian or ...

["Wolfgang Schuster" <schuster.wolfgang@googlemail.com>]

2007/12/5, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> I have noticed that ConTeXt uses "gr" for Greek, but the ISO code
> seems to be "el". Less problematic: should agr be grc instead?
> (OpenType uses PGR, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.)
>
> What do the Greek experts say?
>
>
> Well, English is a story on its own. "us" and "uk" don't have their
> own codes as a separate language, and even worse: uk should stand for
> Ukrainian!!!
>
> "Norwegian" (which is not a language at all) should be patched
> (according to an old user request) once.
>
> A similar problem exists with:
> - Chinese (cn instead of zn)
> - Czech (cz instead of cs)
> - Vietnamese (vn instead of vi)
> - Ukrainian (ua instead of uk!!!)
>
> A case where I have no opinion:
> - deo
>
> Some languages have already changed their codes in the past:
> - Spanish: sp -> es
> - German: du -> de
> - Slovenian: si -> sl (no trace left, I hope :)
>
> My proposal would be to change:
> - gr -> el
> - agr -> grc
> - cz -> cs
> - vn -> vi
> - deo -> ? (if at all)
>      gmh - German, Middle High (ca.1050-1500)
>      goh - German, Old High (ca.750-1050)
> - cn -> zn (with *lots of care*)
>
> And to keep all the needed synonyms. (Besides that: to issue a warning
> if possible.)
>
> I have no idea what to do with Ukrainian and UK though.
>
> -------------
>
> Another issue: some languages need some little modifications or alternatives:
>
> 1.) In German, Slovenian, Croatian, (maybe in other languages as well)
> ... one can use two types of quotes:
> - „" U+201E/U+201C & ‚' U+201A/U+2018 (sorry, a bug in gmail reencodes them)
> - »« U+00BB/U+00AB & ›‹ U+203A/U+2039

It is also common two write «text ‹text› text» in German.

> It might make sense to be able to say something similar to
> \mainlanguage
>     [german]
>     [quotes | quotationmarks | quotationstyle =
>         guillemots | guillemets   or   comma | ninesix]
>
>
> 2.) I could imagine a Serbian user to request being able to typeset in
> two scritpts (Latin or Cyrillic). That means:
> - different labels
> - loading different hyphenation patterns (even though transcription in
> either direction can be made on the fly - I can confirm that a user
> has already asked me if I know how to input text in cyrillic and get
> output in latin - as he wasn't fluent in reading Cyrillic, he wanted
> to misuse ConTeXt to help him read texts from web)
>
> So I could imagine making Cyrillic the default script, but still
> letting one to use
>
> \mainlanguage
>     [serbian]
>     [script=latin,
>      % or even (if any user would be enthusiastic enough to provide code)
>      transliteration=on]
>
> and get latin labels and hyphenation patterns.
>
>
> 3.) Solve the problem with English in a more elegant way:
>
> \mainlanguage
>     [english]
>     [alternative=us]
>
> or
>
> \mainlanguage[en][US] % as in "en_US.UTF-8"
> \mainlanguage[en][GB]
> \mainlanguage[en][AU]
> \mainlanguage[de][AT] % if one ever figures out that "German from
> Germany" isn't good enough
>
> Then, [us] should be kept as a synonym for \mainlanguage[en][US].
>
> (The examples above could also be called via
> \mainlanguage[de][alternative=guillemets] or

As mentioned above this won't work.

> \mainlanguage[sr][alternative=latin].)
>
>
> 4.) deo
> \mainlanguage[de][alternative=old] ??? (no idea what that is about)

The old rules should't be used any longer :-)

> Note that 1.) could be combined (should be "combinable") with this one.
>
> Any thoughts?

I think we should keep the current syntax with mkii and allow better control
in the mkiv code.

Wolfgang
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