Re: [Bug localedata/23140] More languages need two forms of month names

[Keld Simonsen <keld at keldix dot com>]

If month (and day) names are not capitalized, then the should not be capitalized in our
locales, even if they often appear first in a sentence. This is damaging the culture in question.
I see a lot of instances in my own language, where people wrongly spell month (and day) names
with a capitalized first letter, and that is really not correct. Using the argumentation
below is not helping the language.

Best regards
Keld

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:04:25AM +0000, digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com wrote:
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23140
> 
> --- Comment #34 from Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com> ---
> I can't even read Armenian script but I'm trying to figure out what's going on
> here.  Armenian alphabet seems to have upper and lowercase, same as Latin,
> Cyrillic, and Greek.  Glibc currently seems to provide the month names starting
> with uppercase.  It is easy to convert between uppercase and lowercase:
> uppercase code points are 0x30 less than lowercase.  For example, current
> March:
> 
> "<U0544><U0561><U0580><U057F><U056B>"
> 
> Decoded:
> 
> "??????????"
> 
> Should be transliterated as:
> 
> "Marti"
> 
> My patch which is an import from CLDR converts it to:
> 
> alt_mon: "<U0574><U0561><U0580><U057F>"        => "????????"  => "mart"
> mon:     "<U0574><U0561><U0580><U057F><U056B>" => "??????????" => "marti"
> 
> So it looks like the locale data currently contain the month names in a
> genitive case (or whatever is correct to use in a full date) starting with
> uppercase while CLDR uses lowercase exclusively.  Please note that we had a
> similar case in Lithuanian language already.
> 
> But Armenian language seems to use "month day" order, same as English, so the
> month name may tend to appear at the beginning of a sentence and it may be
> reasonable to start it with an uppercase even if there is no rule in a language
> which says that the month names should be always titlecased.  If mon array is
> titlecased then alt_mon should be as well (CLDR suggest that alt_mon may be
> titlecased and mon lowercased but not the reverse) so maybe we should use a
> titlecase for alt_mon as well.
> 
> Converting this to a titlecase the decoded patch for hy_AM would look like
> this:
> 
> diff --git a/localedata/locales/hy_AM b/localedata/locales/hy_AM
> index 805c327..30033a9 100644
> --- a/localedata/locales/hy_AM
> +++ b/localedata/locales/hy_AM
> @@ -130,6 +130,18 @@ abmon       "??????";/
>              "??????";/
>              "??????";/
>              "??????"
> +alt_mon     "??????????????";/
> +            "??????????????";/
> +            "????????";/
> +            "??????????";/
> +            "??????????";/
> +            "????????????";/
> +            "????????????";/
> +            "??????????????";/
> +            "??????????????????";/
> +            "??????????????????";/
> +            "????????????????";/
> +            "??????????????????"
>  mon         "????????????????";/
>              "????????????????";/
>              "??????????";/
> 
> I'm still looking for the people to confirm this.
> 
> Links:
> 
> http://st.unicode.org/cldr-apps/v#/hy/Gregorian/
> https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/armenian/list.htm
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet
> https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D5%84%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%BF%D5%AB_1 (this is an
> example of an Armenian date)
> 
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