speaking with an accent, conceptually

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/02/18 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/02/18/10128879.aspx

Blogs like When the roof got raised, and why and Number format and currency format are not always the same) and Why does the percent stuff have so many restrictions?(the former two talking about the growing pains involved in extending locale support as new languages brought new requirements years ago, and the latter talking about a limitation documented here that is architecturally fixed in Windows 7 and may one day get its data fixed if we are lucky, point out that NLS is a reactive business.

We have something out there, it turns out to not be enough, and so things are changed. Enhanced. Stretched. Modified.

Other times, it is silly to touch things at all. There are times that a language has a similar concept that is different enough that trying to make it work within existing support that "fixing" it just makes no sense.

Like for one thing, consider LOCALE_S1159 and LOCALE_S2359, the per-locale AM and PM indicators.

In a language like BengaliBangla (ref: Even in India, the language is actually known as Bangla (not Bengali)), have the following set in the locale:

LOCALE_S1159          পুর্বাহ্ন

LOCALE_S2359          অপরাহ্ন

If you know Bangla you might see the problem here.

Let's look at these two words in the larger context in which they exist:

This is a multi-part problem, of course.

Now in general terms someone in Bengal or a Bangla-speaking part of Assam or Bangladesh from that table along with a time is the kind of thing one would want in a time format.

One would not generally do so much with AM or PM after the time in these places.

I emailed with friend Omi Azad about it for a bit and he confirmed that the use of these terms would simply be more intuitive; forcing everyone into the 12 hour clock we use with these two less than perfect terms is far from ideal.

The folks in India and Bangladesh are not alone here, either -- Malay has a similar issue (they would use pg for the morning, tgh for 12 to 4pm, ptg for 4-7pm, and mlm for after 7pm) which has the same problem when itcomes to dding it to our time format notions.

By its very nature this would be a much bigger change, making the architectural investments to support:

• the notion of other time periods that a locale might commonly use in date formats than just the AM/PM divisions between noon and midnight;
• the way to have the number of time periods vary;
• the way to define the start time for each;
• the way to identify the labels for each of these time periods.

Here in the US we have such terms though I can't say I'd expect them in a formatted time string.

Even after confirming with Ben and Shihab and Omi and Goldie that some or all of these terms are used, it is still not entirely clear to me whether they would be expected in a long time format, or whether instead this conceptual jump is due to Bangla people moving to the nearest conceptual analogue that they have to our AM/PM and identifying it, since AM/PM wouldn't naturally occur to them if it isn't exactly how they would look at the world.

But since a similar construct is use in the US and other places, this new architecture would make sense, as would going out and trying to get all the data for it across all those locales.

Though obviously this would pretty unlikely at this point.

Bengalis who wanted such a mechanism for time formatting are probably going to have to keep writing their own code, alongside a 24-hour clock.

Or go back in time 10-15 years and make the case then, of course.

Okay, let's assume that change is not going to be heading our way.

There is another problem and I was having it in my reading research on this problem in my elementary "learning Bengali" books and that when I started describing my troubles Omi pointed out with those AM/PM strings that appears to exist in our Bangla fonts. In his words:

হ ্ ন is currently হ্ন but has to be হ্ণ
হ ্ ণ is currently হ্ণ but has to be হ্ন

So when the font is fixed they will look like পুর্বাহ্ণ & অপরাহ্ণ

So the idea is that the HNA and HNNA conjuncts in the Bengali fonts are perhaps reversed?

If he's right that would explain the trouble I was having.

I was going to check with Goldie too, but she is in Mexico and asking her to be typing in Bengali script seems like a little much. I'll wait til she gets back to ask her....

In the meantime, I'm wondering how many people might be typing words the wrong way to get the right appearance, and how much that might muck around with search in the meantime.

This had me thinking about an extensive discussion I had six years ago with someone from Ethiopia about the fact that they did not have time zones but they had a different notion that they used to describe time that amounted to something wi8th many of the same effects related to how hey thought of time compared to when the sun was up (given that Ethiopia is reportedly the hottest place in the world year round I can easily imagine they would have such a mechanism!).

Maybe I'll ask Scott Hanselman if he has any thoughts about that issue.

And now I am wondering how much of the data in our locales is trying to map what people want on an architecture imperfect to representing what people use -- causing our locales to kind of "speak with an accent" the way as person might speak with an accent because he is using the phonemes he grew up with while speaking a language with different phonemes....

Siyam on 18 Feb 2011 8:28 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Feb 2011 9:05 AM:

Siyam on 18 Feb 2011 10:38 AM:

Mihai on 18 Feb 2011 5:49 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Feb 2011 6:02 PM:

Mihai on 19 Feb 2011 1:06 AM:

Alex Cohn on 19 Feb 2011 2:23 PM:

Mihai on 21 Feb 2011 9:26 AM:

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