Re: Application names

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Vincent Untz<vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Le lundi 10 août 2009, à 09:03 -0400, William Jon McCann a écrit :
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Vincent Untz<vuntz gnome org> wrote:
>
> [need to think about your answer to the first question]
>
>> >  + translators have stated that it's wrong to do "Name - GenericName"
>> >   programmatically. So, hrm, why would we not listen to them?
>>
>> That hasn't been established.  In the xdg-list thread one of the last
>> comments from Christian Rose said this:
>> "Webbläsare - Epiphany" or "Webbläsare (Epiphany)" is not wrong per
>> se, it's just bad language style."
>
> See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2009-August/msg00072.html
> from which I will quote only one expression (please do not trust me and
> read the full mail :-)): "orthographically incorrect".

Actually that mail seems to support my point.  It makes the same
critical error that I was pointing out.  GenericName is not a fragment
here.  That mail describes GenericName as "fragment [that] is
conceived as a description, not as a (generic) name with capital
letter(s)..."  That is incorrect.  A GenericName is always a name and
should not use sentence capitalization.  Again, Name and GenericName
are not fragments of a fuller-name.  They are substitutes for one
another.  They cannot be joined together to make a fuller name.  What
we are trying to do here is to simply display both at the same time -
not join them.

Part of the confusion here is that GenericName has been abused in the
past to afford description.  Another problem is that people are
assuming the dash or (as I prefer, and the patch actually uses) the
hyphenation point is being used grammatically here.  It is not.
Semantically it is the equivalent of an "or" or "also".  It would
probably be more correct to use "/" here but we are making an artistic
compromise by suggesting '‧'.

Thanks,
Jon