Dear developers,
[tl;dr: how about ISO language codes for input language selection?]
some time ago, I suggested to add French ("français") to the list of
note-name languages as an alias to "italiano". This is the current
state, "español" was also added.
The discussion back then was about some inconsistencies:
- the language for commands is English, these keywords are in different
languages:
\language "deutsch"
^ English ^ German
- problem: "français" needs a utf8 char ç
- "espanol" is a valid note-name language, "francais" isn’t
*Summary*: special characters are needed for some languages to spell
them correctly, this is because no international system is used here
Now I have a new suggestion:
We could use ISO 639-1 language codes for the input language
specification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
Advantages:
- international standard
- widely adopted and known for language selection
- the user language doesn't matter (no need to decide between French and
français)
- no special characters (plain ascii)
- it is short
The current language names could be kept for backwards compatibility.
This would mean, the current alias list
scm/define-note-names.scm:968
would be extended like this:
- '((espanol español)
- (italiano français)))
+ '((espanol español)
+ (italiano français)
+ (nederlands nl)
+ (catalan ca)
+ (deutsch de)
+ (english en)
+ (espanol es)
+ (italiano fr)
+ (italiano it)
+ (norsk nb)
+ (norsk nn)
+ (portugues pt)
+ (suomi fi)
+ (svenska sv)
+ (vlaams vls))) ; unclear*
* I have no good proposition for vlaams as the language code is nl like
Dutch/nederlands. The ISO 639-2 code is vls, another option might be nl-BE?
What do you think?
Cheers,
Joram
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