Re: [COMMITTED] fi_FI: Define yesstr, nostr

[Keld Simonsen <keld at keldix dot com>]

On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 11:35:35AM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On 04/07/2013 10:18 AM, Keld Simonsen wrote:
> > I think the yes and no strings should be starting with a lowercase letter.
> > This in line with other names like day names and month names, they are also
> > with initial lower case when that is the generic spelling.
> 
> You need to gather consensus on that and post a patch.
> 
> On 2013-03-21 Kalle Olavi Niemetalo <kon@iki.fi> wrote:
> ~~~
> I had some doubts on whether the words should be capitalized.
> Several other locales (including cs_CZ and tr_TR) use lower case
> for yesstr and nostr, and "kyllä" and "ei" are normally written in
> lower case in Finnish if they occur in the middle of a sentence.
> However, I suppose yesstr and nostr are intended to be the entire
> answer to some question asked by an application, rather than part
> of a sentence, so "Kyllä" and "Ei" should be fine.
> ~~~
> 
> On 2013-03-21 Marko Myllyen <myllynen@redhat.com> wrote:
> ~~~
> this is the rationale I used as well and the locales I happened to check
> for reference (POSIX and en_IN) both had them capitalized. I would
> suppose that if the words are in the middle of a sentence then they are
> coming from an application which would have been translated themselves
> and the plain yesstr/nostr are used in cases like you mentioned in your
> follow-up email.
> ~~~
> 
> Consensus from Marko and Kalle seems to be that uppercase
> letters should be the norm. I agree with that expectation for
> at least Spanish (es_AR) and English (en_CA), two countries I
> am intimately familiar with (being born in Argentina, but having
> lived much of my life in Canada).
> 
> Can you make a case for not using uppercase?

As said it is a design citeria for the locales, both
POSIX and TR 14652 and TR 30112 that if a word in a language canonically begins
with a small letter, then the locale has the same word with an initial
small letter. This is accordance with normal dictionalry stylei, eg. OED.
And also with definition style in ISO standards. Then it is up to
the application to capitalize the initial letter if this is required
eg because it is the first word in a sentence.

Eg. the English OK is written in Danish as "o.k." according
to Danish ortography. Specifying it as "O.k." would not reflect 
this rule.

> 
> Is it correct to compare fi_FI entries to other fi_FI entries?
> * It seems to me that each entry is unique in the use it has for
> programs.
> 
> Is it correct to compare fi_FI to other locales?
> * This is probably the most rationale comparison since users
> will be keeping the program the same, but switching locales.
> 
> Ask a native speaker?
> * Perhaps the most sensible to ask the native speaker about
> their expectations.
> 
> I see that en_US uses 'Yes' and 'No.'
> 
> That bolsters by expectation that all of the yesstr/nostr
> values should be uppercase for use in a single word sentence
> or cases (1), (2), and (3) as Kalle notes here:
> http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2013-03/msg00503.html

That posting included:

> I meant yesstr and nostr could be used in these ways:
> 
> (1) A program writes a question to stdout, disables tty echo, and
>    waits for an answer.  When the user presses "k", the program
>    takes that as "Yes" and echoes the whole string "Kyllä".  A
>    capital K is fine here.

I think it is even or more natural to echo back "k", as this is most likely
what the user typed in. Users normally type in lowercase.


> (2) A program writes a question to stdout and appends "(Kyllä/Ei)".
>    Upper-case letters are good here because they match the
>    characters that yesexpr and noexpr recognize.

Normal practice in linux interfaces is to write with case the possible
answers. If you write "Kyllä/Ei" then people would expect to answer with a capital K or capital E.
And that would be cumbersome - needing two fingers in operation in stead of just one.

> (3) A program displays "Kyllä" and "Ei" buttons in a window and
>    expects the user to click one of them.  Such buttons
>    typically start with upper-case letters.

That is probably true. Here you should then convert the first letter to uppercase.


> (4) A program displays a list of key-value pairs, something like
>      Ilmastointi: kyllä
>      CD-soitin:   kyllä
>      Vetokoukku:  ei
>      Väri:        punainen
>    Here, lower case might be more common in Finnish.

Yes, and probably also in Danish and English.

> I don't know of any program actually using yesstr and nostr. 

Me neither. I was not aware that these keywords existed. Anyway, I will write some documentation for it.

Best regards
Keld