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

["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 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
\mainlanguage[sr][alternative=latin].)


4.) deo
\mainlanguage[de][alternative=old] ??? (no idea what that is about)
Note that 1.) could be combined (should be "combinable") with this one.


Any thoughts?

Mojca
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