Re: New team for Tigrinya_Eritrea (ti_ER)

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

(Plase keep gnome-i18n gnome org cc:ed)


tor 2005-04-21 klockan 08:49 -0700 skrev Simon Mebrahtu:
> Hi!
> 
> First of all I would like to say sorry for responding
> late because my computer was locked out of our network
> for some days due to some technical reason. Now let me
> say some thing on my main topic.
> 
> If am not mistaken your main worry was Is "written
> Tigrinya in Eritrea very much different from Tigrinya
> spoken in other places?". Now to answer your question
> let me give you some information about Tigrinya.
> Tigrinya is a semitic language which is spoken by a
> majority of citizens in the multilingual state of
> Eritrea(ti_ER), as well as in the Northern(Tigray)
> part of Ethiopia(ti_ET). But even though ti_ER and
> ti_ET have the same name(which is Tigrinya) they
> differ a lot from each other. Of course they share the
> same script, which is Ethiopic ( as a matter of fact
> the script's name is Ge'ez(both a language and a
> script) or Fidel Script to be more specific and almost
> all the languages in Eritrea and Ethiopia are
> descendants of this script, but in the Unicode
> standard its referred by "Ethiopic" I don't know why,
> Don't get me wrong on this!!!. I think this is enough
> as far as concerning their difference. 
> 
> And concerning the # teams, I think that a localized
> Gnome for ti_ER is of no use to ti_ET speakers and
> Vice-Versa even thought they share a lot in common. So
> my suggestion is it's better to have different teams
> for each language(ti_ER and ti_ET). Regarding ti_ER,
> am the first one to start localization of any kind of
> software including Gnome.

We don't have any team for ti_ET yet, and it doesn't look likely that we
will ever have one, at least not in the near time. So wouldn't it make
sense to just have one single Tigrinyan (ti) effort, at least for now?
Then when someone steps up and says that he or she is prepared to
translate into ti_ET, we can make the distinction, but we keep it as one
effort until then.

Even if there are differences as you say, I assume that many ti_ET users
would prefer having ti_ER translations, instead of no translations at
all and the applications being shown in English. Am I correct in my
assumption, or do ti_ET users actually prefer (and understand) English
rather than ti_ER?


Christian