THANK GOD IT'S FROODAY?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/04/27 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/04/27/8429457.aspx


Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
Regular readers should keep in mind that all I said in The End? still applies; the allusion to the X-Files continues for people who understand such references....

The other day, colleague Santhosh pointed out to some people that "The abbreviated day name for Friday for ml-IN is wrong."

Curious.

I wrote up a little program to take a look:

using System;
using System.Globalization;

namespace Testing {
    class Testing {

        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("ml-IN");
            DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi = ci.DateTimeFormat;
            for(int i=0; i < 7; i++) {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}\t{1}", dtfi.DayNames[i], dtfi.AbbreviatedDayNames[i]);
            }
        }
    }
}

A quick chcp 65001 and a clipboard copy/paste and I got the data back:

ഞായറാഴ്ച        ഞായറ്.
തിങ്കളാഴ്ച      തിങ്കള്.
ചൊവ്വാഴ്ച       ചൊവ്വ.
ബുധനാഴ്ച        ബുധന്.
വ്യാഴാഴ്ച       വ്യാഴം.
വെള്ളിയാഴ്ച     വെളോളി.
ശനിയാഴ്ച        ശനി.

Indeed. That full name

വെള്ളിയാഴ്ച

looks okay, but that abbreviated name

വെളോളി.

does look a bit off.

Santhosh also suggested that abbreviated name should instead have been

വെള്ളി.

and that does look like a bit better of an abbreviated form, all things considered.

The problem is indeed that what was expected was a nice conjunct with a LETTER LLA/Chandrakkala/LETTER LLA which instead ended up with a VOWEL SIGN OO in between them. Which would indeed be wrong.

I wonder if someone was doing it with Unicode code points -- putting a U+0d4b rather than U+0d4d -- thus perhaps making it a simple typo in data entry?

It is funny -- putting the chandrakkala in there does something minor on the rendering side, basically

ളള

versus

ള്ള

If you look very carefully (and your OS supports it) you'll see it is a bit more connected. :-)

Though this is one of those weird cases one might hesitate to call it a conjunct in the conventional sense (since the former isn't really anything so if not for the "Virama" model one would wonder whether one could just shape it without the extra invisible character....

 

This blog brought to you by(U+0d4b, aka MALAYALAM VOWEL SIGN OO)


# Mark on 27 Apr 2008 3:38 AM:

What sort of script is this? I just can't understand!

# Pavanaja U B on 29 Apr 2008 4:24 AM:

> Sunday, April 27, 2008 3:38 AM by Mark

> What sort of script is this? I just can't understand!

That is Malayalam, an Indian language. Incidentally, the word malayalam written in English is a palindrome.

-Pavanaja


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