Hi all! So the time has come for us to ask the OpenOffice.org native-lang community to welcome the Breton native-lang project. We have been working on the Breton localization for 10 full months now, first on the 1.1.4 Level 1 localization, which is now completed at 100% (including the extras) and whose final build is available for download at http://www.drouizig.org since August, 1rst, 2005.
We just completed these days 100% of the Level 1 localization of OpenOffice.org 2.0 (including the extras too) and this version can also be downloaded from our site. As we are a small team of 3 voluntaries we had to make choices and so decided to focus our efforts first on the localization itself, and this is why we are only sending this request to the community today: Time has come for more visibility. Like Welsh, Cornish and formerly Gaulish, Breton is a Celtic language belonging to the P-Celtic (Brittonic) branch, traditionally spoken in the western part of Brittany by about 250.000 people, most of them being elderly people. For many decades, although nobody went to jail or was murdered for speaking the language, Breton has been strongly marginalized (1.200.000 people used to speak Breton in 1900), and is still nowadays as France does not give any official status to any other language apart from French in its own territory. May this piece of information be useful to anybody, along with Greece, France is the only European country that did not ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, as an example. This said some improvements have occurred in the recent past, mainly since the mid-50s. We had to wait 1951 (thanks to Deixone's and Savary's laws) to see the language admitted in Schools and Universities. Before this date the only place in the world where Breton was officially taught was in Wales, at the University of Aberystwyth... Today about 10.000 young children are learning Breton every year in bilingual schools (we expect 20.000 in 2020) and officials are forecasting a total amount of about 100.000 "educated" speakers in 2020. To help their own development, Breton schools, like other "minority language" schools in Europe, give English lessons to their pupils earlier than in the "normal" schools. Moreover, many people, including a significant part of the French population (50% in fact) are supporting minority languages in France and a good example is the French OpenOffice.org native language group who friendly supports our initiative since the beginning. More information on Breton can be read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breton_language What else... some information (still up to date) about our team has been posted on the dev list and can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00607.html We are definitely thinking that web space and mailing lists at br.openoffice.org would facilitate collaboration with joining members, other native-lang teams, and would give more visibility in the World to our project. Other helpful data: Code Page is ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). ISO-8859-14 (Latin8, Celtic languages) or 15 (Latin9) can be used as well. ISO-639-1 code for Breton is "br". ISO-639-2 code for Breton is "bre". No Windows LCID until now. My OpenOffice.org username is "drouizig". I've signed the JCA. Thanks! Philippe --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
