Re: New team for Dari (prs)

["Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh gmail com>]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Tommi Vainikainen <thv iki fi> wrote:
> According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari_%28Persian%29)
> this Dari language is also spoken in Pakistan, Tajikistan and
> Turkmenistan. Should Dari speakers in those countries use country code
> _AF as their locale? Isn't such usage problematic in many ways?

Not at all, if we distinguish "spoken" languages with "written"
languages. In Tajikistan, they write the language in Cyrillic, and use
the "tg" ISO 639-1 code. In Pakistan and Turkmenistan, they rarely
write in the language, and when they do, they either use the Iranian
orthography or the Afghan one.

We translate computer user interfaces to written languages, not spoken
languages.

> Therefore I argue that technically it is better to use three letter
> language codes if ISO standard has assigned a separate code, because
> then there is no disambiguity of using country codes etc.

Let's say I am a Persian speaker living in the US. What should I use
on my GNU/Linux computer when there is no fa_US? I would use fa_IR or
fa_AF depending on my preference for the orthography, and then change
other locale settings like LC_PAPER, the timezone, etc to use US
measurements.

Roozbeh