Kaixo!

On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 05:26:18PM +0330, Arash Zeini wrote:
 
> > It's really the country name, IR for Iran. Since the layout is not a
> > general Persian (Farsi) layout, but the National Iranian keyboard layout.
> > There is no "en" keyboard, but you can see "us", "uk", "ca", ...
> 
> I know, but IR refers to a country with many more languages than Farsi and 
> the keyboard layout clearly refers to the language of Farsi. The same way it 
> wouldn't be correct to use IN or something related for India as there are 
> many more languages spoken in India. That is why the keyboard for Bengali 
> (work in progress) e.g. is called ben (I am not really sure about the name) 
> and not in.

It's not the same.
The various languages of India use different scripts.
Don't the various languages used in Iran use the same arabic script?

Note there is no such thing as a "Hindi" keyboard, but a Devanagari keyboard:
it is not named after a language, but after a script (even if for other
languages there may be equivalence)

I have thought a bit about the keyboards problem, and now I think the
three levels to define them are, in such order:

* script (latin, cyrillic, arabic, devanagari,...)
* country or geographic area
* eventual sub-variant.

Language is not the most important thing, the most important is what symbols
appear on the keys or what is possible to type.
Often with a same keyboard you can type in a lot of different languages.

Also, often the script is assumed for a given country; there is no need
to specify "latin-us" or "cyrillic-ru" for example.

However, there is a difference between "cyrilli-yu" and "latin-yu";
and between the various "dev,tml,...-in".

Do you think a tree-like hierarchie with level one being the script,
then the countries, then variants would be a good thing ?

Or keep as now: using country for the file name, with exception of countries
with languages using different scripts, where the keyboards are named
after the script (if they are used only there, like in India), or where
a script is more used and gets the name from the country, and keyboards
for other scripts are named from the language (like in Canada, "ca" for
latin layout(s) and "inuktitut" and the like for non latin scripts) ?

But in the case of Iran, are there other keyboard layouts in use (and others
that are primarly iranian) ?
If there is only one layout calling it "iranian" seems the most logicalv way.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/            PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975

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