Looks like we had our LIPs done big time, this week!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/04/03 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/04/03/9989137.aspx

This blog is not about a bunch of plastic surgery. I'm just saying....

Wow! A huge number of LIPs were released with various announcements all week.

I didn't ant to push back my blogs I had written for a whole week so instead I figured I'd do a bunch at once.

Let's see if I can get them all down here:

• The Windows 7 Gujarati (ગુજરાતી) LIP, 32-bit only, must have English resources for fallback;
  
  NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:  46 million speakers
  NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF: ગુજરાતી
  Gujarati is the official language of the Indian state of Gujarat and spoken by the majority of people there. It is one of India's 22 official languages and also spoken by migrant communities all over the world.
  Gujarati was influenced by Persian during the five centuries of the rule of the Sultans not only in vocabulary but even in structure. An important caste dialect is that of descendants of Persians, the Parsis, who live in the southern part of Gujarat.
  FUN FACTS:
  • The mother tongue of both the "father of India", Gandhi, and the "father of Pakistan", Jinnah, was Gujarati. Gandhi's writing have strongly influenced the development of the language.
  • Due to migration, there are substantial communities of Gujarati speakers in three East African countries: Tanzania has 250,000 speakers, Uganda 150,000 and Kenya 50,000. There are 300,000 Gujarati speakers in the United Kingdom.
  MORE INFO: here
  
• The Windows 7 Galician (galego) LIP, 32-bit and 64-bit, must have Spanish resources for fallback;
  
  NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:  3 million
  NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:  galego
  Galician is spoken by about 3 million people in the Autonomous Region of Galicia, in which it is the official regional language, and in neighboring areas in northwestern Spain.
  MORE INFO: here
  
• The Windows 7 Basque (euskara) LIP, 32-bit and 64-bit, must have either Spanish or French resources for fallback;
  
  NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:  ~700,000
  NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:  euskara
  Basque is spoken in and around the western Pyrenees facing the Bay of Biscay in northern Spain (by about 600,000 people) and south-western France (by about 100,000 people). On the Spanish side there are three Basque provinces --  Alava (Araba), Biskaia (Biskay), and Gipuzkoa -- which form the Autonomous Basque Community (CAV), where Basque is official regional language. Basque is also spoken in the northern area of the Autonomous Region of Navarra (Nafarroa) of north central Spain and in the French department of Pyrenées Atlantiques.
  Basque grammar is extremely complicated – starting with the fact that the subject of a sentence looks different depending on whether the verb has an object or not (This is called an ergative-absolutive system.)
  After the suppression of Spain’s regional languages under Franco, Basque has recovered and the number of Basque speakers is even increasing. There is an upsurge in its use in literature, the media and higher education. A Basque language academy is leading standardization of the language which has widely divergent dialects. Today Basque is one of Spain’s four official languages.
  FUN FACTS:
  • The is no f sound in Basque - the letter f is pronounced as an h.
  • For numbers, Basque uses a system based on 20 for the tens: hogei is 20, hogeitamar 30, berrogai 40, berrogai eta hamar 50, hirurgei 60, larogei 80. Might this be where the French quatre-vingts (literally four twenties, 80) comes from?
  CLASSIFICATION: Basque is a language isolate, meaning it has no known relatives. It is unrelated to the surrounding Indo-European languages and no connection to other languages has so far been proven (although linguists have tried to trace the origin of the language for a long time, and theories have proposed linking the language to languages as remote as Georgian).
  SCRIPT: Basque is written in Latin script. The letters c, q, v, w, y, which are only used for loan words are not considered part of the alphabet. The orthography of Basque has been influenced by Spanish.
  MORE INFO: here
  
• The Windows 7 Uzbek (O’zbekcha) LIP, 32-bit only, must have English or Russian resources for fallback;
  
  NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 20 million native speakers
  NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF: O’zbekcha
  Uzbek is the official language of Uzbekistan in Central Asia where it is spoken by 15 million people. It is also spoken in the neighboring countries of Tajikistan (1.2 million speakers), Kyrgyzstan (550,000), Kazakhstan (330,000) and Turkemistan (320,000).
  Southern Uzbek, which is spoken in Afghanistan by 1.4 million speakers, is closely related but considered as a separate language by most scholars.
  FUN FACT: The name "Uzbek" is said to be derived from the Kazakh ruler Uzbek Khan who ruled over what became the Uzbek people in the 16th century.
  CLASSIFICATION: Uzbek is a member of the South Eastern or Uighur group of the Turkic language family. The most closely related language is Uighur.
  SCRIPT: Before 1923, Uzbek was written in a modified Persian-Arabic script, like all Central Asian languages. The alphabet was adapted to Uzbek in 1923, but in 1929 a Latin alphabet was introduced. This again was replaced by Cyrillic in 1939/1940.
  During a 1992 conference of all Turkic-speaking nations in Ankara, it was decided to introduce the Latin script for all participating countries. Uzbekistan started the transition in 1997 and made a modified Latin script official. However, the deadline for full transition has been moved continuously, and Cyrillic is still widely used.
  MORE INFO: here
  
• The Office 2007 Amharic (አማርኛ) LIP, 32-bit only; providing support for PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook 2007;
  
  NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:  አማርኛ
  SCRIPT: Amharic is written in the Fidel script, often (less accurately) called "Ethiopic" by people outside of Ethiopia
  
  MORE INFO: here

Enjoy!

John Cowan on 4 Apr 2010 12:32 AM:

Pavanaja U B on 7 Apr 2010 3:23 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 7 Apr 2010 7:31 AM:

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