Alastair McKinstry wrote: > DÃ Domh, 2004-04-04 ag 02:53 +0200, scrÃobh Frans Pop: > >> I really think that using the 'really' short names (that is just plain >> Taiwan instead of Taiwan, P.. of C..) would not be a bad compromise >> despite what the official so called short UN names say. And note that it *is* a compromise, since the offical Taiwanese government version would be short name "China", long name "Republic of China", with the mainland government being "People's Republic of China".
> Agreed the "official short names" are ugly ; > (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html) > eg. "LAO PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC", "LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA" for > those countries normally called "Laos" and "Libya". Yeah, they are incredibly ugly, aren't they. Heck; grab a National Geographic Society atlas and see what the political names used on the map are. Then use those. It's a better standard, at least for countries which actually exist (doesn't the UN still recognize some which don't?) Of course, you could always use the official long names for everyone, thus abusing nearly everyone with stupid names. ;-) The benefit of the "short" names is always lost when some of them are stupidly long. > However, sometimes > the short version is the problem too: eg. do we allow > "MACEDONIA, THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF", to be shortened to > "Macedonia"? I'm sure the Greeks won't agree to that ... Well, it's only particularly crazy Greek governments which care; most Greeks accept that Macedonia (the country) is *not* making territorial claims on Greece Macedonia, and there are lots of other situations in the world where a country has the same name as a province in a neighboring country. So I wouldn't worry, as long as this is a list of *countries*, anyway, since there's no other *country* called Macedonia (given that Greece admits that Greek Macedonia is part of Greece). It's not like the situation with the Congo, where there actually are two countries with the same standard name, or the similar situation which used to be true of Yemen, or further back Cameroon, etc. >> After all, isn't Linux for a large part about being "free" as in "able to >> choose for yourselves" which is what Taiwan has been trying to to for the >> past decades. > > Ironically, one of the main reasons I created the iso-codes package is > to allow this; if someone wanted to create "Kurdish Linux" and add > Kurdistan as a territory, then they would only have 1 list to override > or correct on Linux, rather than n separate lists of countries and > translations ... > (But I don't want to fork Debian over this issue :-( ) > > >> I think the really short names are often a lot more politically neutral >> than the semi-official names in iso-3166. > > The countries in question have used the list to make their own political > points; but the problem is that Debian deciding to change some names and > not others is no longer being neutral. Well, maybe it would be better to go with a different, less political, more neutral list, like the names used on the National Geographic Society maps, for instance. :-O Going with the names used on maps would also guarantee the selection of genuinely short names, since mapmakers have physical problems putting overly-long names on their maps, and so won't do it. -- Make sure your vote will count. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
