Hi Frans,
«As far as I know Debian Internationalisation in general knows of Portuguese
as spoken in Portugal (pt-pt or pt_PT), Portuguese as spoken in Brazil (pt-
br or pt_BR), and also of Portuguese in general (pt).»
I've always wondered why there are the xx language codes if there
are also the xx-XX ones. I've always thought they're supposed to be
used, aren't they? But, what for?
«I have no knowledge of Portuguese at all and I would therefore like to ask
you what advantages you see in keeping up this distinction between pt-pt
and pt-br (only added as new language for the buster manual but without
further progress) for the Debian Edu manual, when also Portuguese in
general seems to be a useful option, and, as I assume (but perhaps this is
a false assumption) can be understood both in Portugal and in Brazil.»
Yes, Portuguese, just like English, Spanish, French, German etc. is
just one language and as such can be understood in any Portuguese
speaking country. However, there are variations in the use of the
language, both spoken an written, from country to country just like
what happens with the other languages. And people tend to dislike the
variation they aren't used to, since it feels "unnatural". For
instance, in quite a few cases pt-PT and pt-BR use different words for
the same term in English - a "file" is translated as "ficheiro" in
pt-PT and "arquivo" in pt-BR (both long established Portuguese words)
and "mouse" has been translated to pt-PT (as "rato") and simply
borrowed from English in pt-BR. There are also different
expressions/idioms, etc.
There is another aspect, though - orthography, particularly related to
consecutive consonants. As result of the natural evolution of the
language in each country, many words with consecutive consonants (like
"actual" and "know") have lost their first of the two consonant sounds
(and in many cases that consonant was dropped in the writing). But
mostly it didn't happen with the same words in both countries -
natural evolution runs by itself. Trying to avoid of this (there are
other similar but less obvious issues), at a certain moment the
Brazilian and Portuguese governments have decided to set a "common
orthography" (in fact, for political reasons related to the status of
the language in the UN and other IOs). And exactly because many of the
dropped sounds weren't in the same words in both countries, the so
called "common orthography" became more a "messy orthography" than a
common one.
On top of this, Angola and Mozambique, the two big Portuguese speaking
countries in Africa, regarded all this as a Portuguese-Brazilian
affair. Besides, they still have a large population with poor formal
education (who would have a hard time adapting to orthography changes)
and being developing countries probably have other priorities,
including because of the spending a change of all school books, for
instance, would imply. Hence, they've kept the Portuguese orthography
that was in place prior to the change.
Because of all this and of the poor quality of the orthographic
agreement, even in Portugal (not sure about Brazil), many people,
including scholars, keep using the previous rules.
So, a long story just to tell you that users of pt-PT and pt-BR aren't
very fond of using "unnaturally" written texts, and that the two big
Portuguese speaking countries in Africa still follow the previous
orthography rules, which made me think of using the "pt" locale to
cater for them and the pt-PT for the new orthographic rules (these do
not solve all the differences of the ficheiro/arquivo type and others
regarding to pt-BR).
«Why I'm asking is because it worries me a bit that maintaining different
Portuguese versions of the manual may need quite some effort in the
future, while the Debian Edu manual is quite extensive.
So if this would make sense, it might be preferable to have only one
generic Portuguese version of the manual. What do you think?»
I can understand your concerns, of course, hence I'll leave it to you
to decide whether you want to deal with an extra locale or not. My
intention is to keep updating my translations according to the
evolution in the English originals, but this is not a promise, of
course - no one can rule the future, not even his own.
Kind regards,
José Vieira
