The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 20: Yes, it's Bangla. Not Bengali!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/03/02 05:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/03/02/10276258.aspx

Previous blogs from this series:

• part 19 (In honor of International Mother Language Day...)
• part 18 (Two scripts that share ten digits can be trouble)
• part 17 (Today I feel like translating you more than before)
• part 16 (We can't scale to a Xishuangbanna Dai locale, but…)
• part 15 (Fixing our listings up in Windows 8!)
• part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!)
• part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!)
• part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO)
• part 11 (What language is that keyboard for?)
• part 10 (Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design?
• part 9 (Nastaleeq vs. Nastaliq? Either way, Windows 8 has got it!
• part 8 ([Finally] taking care of some [more] languages in Pakistan
• part 7 (That would be a 'call and a raise' for Hawaiian)
• part 6 (Behind the Cherokee Phonetic layout in Windows 8)
• part 5 (...until the decision was made to not refuse to add it)
• part 4 (working beyond one's bugs, and the case for an MSKLC update)
• part 3 (working beyond one's bugs, the setup)
• part 2 (raising the roof on keyboards)
• part 1 (Some people don't want to double-d's)
• part 0 (The introduction)

Now it was in January 30 of last year that I wrote a specific blog.

A blog quite relevant to today,in fact

The blog in question: Even in India, the language is actually known as Bangla (not Bengali).

Especially the part at the end:

I figure the first step is to ask the question. So in the hopes that a few of those 55 million Bangla speakers in India are reading this or have been pointed to it by friends what they think of the two language packs, compared....

And yes, I think both locale names in English should be updated to Bangla in future versions of Windows either way.

And then what friend Omi Azad just wrote on Facebook:

The number of Likes is much higher now, of course!

Now I don't want to imply that I have the power to have accomplished this.

Arbitrarily.

On my own.

And without oversight.

Because I don't.

And I wouldn't.

And I didn't.

And I can't.

But we have received a lot of feedback from customers and native speakers that this is the case -- that all early feedback helped contribute to the investigation, which helped to handle the situation.

It was truly a pleasure to be involved on this longstanding issue.

Which I suppose leaves the Bengali vs. Kamrupi? crowd still unhappy, but then the Assamese don't want the Assamese language name changed to Kamrupi in Microsoft products; they want the term Bengali changed in Unicode character names to Kamrupi. Which we can't do.

I'm less pleased about not having any way to help them, but they didn't give me (or Unicode) many (or even any) options.

I mean, LIPs do not get to localize the character names in CHARMAP.EXE (discussed in If you have to ask "How do I say ____ in ____ language?" then maybe you shouldn't!), so "deciding" to "fix" that issue in the LIP would be a complicated issue.

And who knows if the localizers would agree with the Kamrupi issue anyway; it is a contentious one, and a hard one to get objective responses on.

We (and I) will have to be satisfied with what we (and I) can do, since neither we (nor I) will be able to please everybody....

John Cowan on 2 Mar 2012 9:32 AM:

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