Re: Formatting lists of things

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 14:12 +0200, Claude Paroz wrote:
> Le samedi 23 juin 2007 �3:35 +0200, Wouter Bolsterlee a �it :
> > 2007-06-22 klockan 17:23 skrev Shaun McCance:
> > > I've run into a localization issue in formatting DocBook,
> > > and I need some input from translators to decide how best
> > > to solve it.  Let's say I have a list of people's names.
> > > There could be any number of people.  I need to format
> > > this as inline text.  So in English, I'd do:
> > > 
> > >   Tom and Dick
> > >   Tom, Dick, and Harry
> > >   Tom, Dick, Harry, and Sally
> > 
> > Dutch (both nl_NL and nl_BE) practice is to omit the last comma. Your
> > example as they would be written in Dutch:
> > 
> >   Tom and Dick
> >   Tom, Dick and Harry
> >   Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally
> 
> I guess this is more or less the same with most European languages. What
> about other languages, Djihed, Ya� Abel ?
> 
> Claude

It's the same in Persian too (which was based on French), but more
modern styles (in academia for example) have started keeping the last
comma.  It just makes more sense and is less ambiguous.

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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