by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/07/23 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/07/23/4005816.aspx
No, this post is not about my 20-year high school reunion, that is coming up next year.
In fact they are starting to gear up for that, though. I just saw that former classmate Melanie Rosenberg Luria is involved with the planning and they are looking for some assistance.
Maybe I should offer to help out a bit, something that might be nice since I kind of blew off the 10-year.
But like I said this post is not about that kind of reunion.
It is about developer Tracey's question about the Reunion region entry in Regional and Language Options:
She wondered what that was about -- was it the region you use when you are at high school reunions?
Actually, it is not. Though that would be funny for reasons that I will talk about another time involving RAS and networking and phone books and such....
It is actually talking about Réunion, the island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, one of the overseas départements of France.
It is on that list for the same reason that one sees Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Antarctica, or any number of different regions that appear on the list -- because a setting covering where you are at needs to cover a lot of the places you might be.
The é becomes an e most likely because of the US tendency to drop diacritics at the drop of a hat, even though the rest of the English-speaking world is less likely to do that. The French version of Windows might have fixed this since it is a localizable resource, though the context they seem to be given is piss-poor enough that if they missed it I wouldn't tend to blame them. :-)
I tend to consider the lack of other strings and the lack of an acute to be core issues, as well as the fact that most regions have both friendly names and official ones and it seems like Réunion could use that kind of thing....
In any case, the reason for an entry for Reunion is that it is an entry for Réunion!
This post brought to you by é (U+00e9, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE)
Mike on 23 Jul 2007 6:11 AM:
Wow. Microsoft acknowledges "rest of English-speaking world".
Now we need a version of Windows that doesn't drop the letter 'u' at the drop of a hat, or carelessly invert "re" :-P
Réunion's loss of an accent is more acute (haha) when you notice that São Tomé and Príncipe still has all 3.
Michael S. Kaplan on 23 Jul 2007 11:52 AM:
Well, I don't know that one could claim that Microsoft acknowledges it, but I do. :-)