Re: Formatting lists of things

["Simos Xenitellis" <simos lists googlemail com>]

On 6/22/07, Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 12:38:13PM -0300, Raphael Higino wrote:
> > Hey, Shaun. Good catch.
> >
> > First a silly note (and question too): AFAIK in English you'd just use
> > that last comma for disambiguation purposes, right?
> >
> > On 6/22/07, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > > 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
> > >
> > > The names, of course, don't get translated, but the
> > > commas and "and" should be.  So again, this time with
> > > parentheses around the potentially translatable parts:
> > >
> > >   Tom( and ) Dick
> > >   Tom(, )Dick(, and )Harry
> > >   Tom(, )Dick(, )Harry(, and )Sally
> > >
> > > If every language works exactly like English, then I
> > > can just mark three strings for translation: ", ",
> > > " and ", and ", and ".  But my guess is that they
> > > aren't all like English.
> > >
> > > So translators, please let me know hows lists of
> > > things are formatted in your language, including
> > > instructions on exceptions (i.e. in English, two
> > > elements are formatted differently than three or
> > > more, as above).
> >
> > In Portuguese (at least here in Brazil) our lists just wouldn't have
> > that last comma:
> >
> > Tom and Dick
> > Tom, Dick and Harry
> > Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally
>
> Same in Slovak (sk).

Modern Greek does not have the serial comma.

Wikipedia has an extensive article on serial commas,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

Simos