Comment 11 for bug 991002

Christian,

Maybe it's true that we are very badly informed; thanks for enlightening us.

I do admit that keeping the iso-codes package in sync with applicable standards sounds reasonable, at least from a formal POV. OTOH, making exceptions, when details in the standards are apparently outdated, would also make sense IMO.

As regards translations, maybe it would be a good idea if the translation teams in Bangladesh and India cooperated on bn.po translations, and that bn_IN.po was dropped. (There is no bn_IN language pack in Ubuntu.) But even if that happened, and applied to the issue of this bug report, what you suggest would require translations of Bengali into (the local equivalent of) Bangla. Assuming that both Bangla and Bengali are existing words in Bangla (and many other languages), doing so would not be correct from a translation POV, I suppose.

I checked out whether nl_langinfo() may be of some help:

   $ cat test.c
   #include <stdio.h>
   #include <locale.h>
   #include <langinfo.h>

   main () {
      setlocale (LC_IDENTIFICATION, "bn_BD.UTF-8");
      char *lang_name = nl_langinfo (_NL_IDENTIFICATION_LANGUAGE);
      printf ("%s\n", lang_name);
   }

   $ ./test
   BengaliBangla
   $

Hmm.. Probably not.

IMO, at first hand this is about Ubuntu showing awareness of the fact that the name of the language has been changed. Giving the opposite impression is a bad idea. Making current and potential Ubuntu users, who speak Bangla, happy is better. Bangla is one of the biggest languages in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers).

I tend to think that we should acknowledge that things change, and that approving the proposed merge proposal, at least in Ubuntu, is the better option. While sending a note "upstream", i.e. to ISO, of course. ;-)

"The state language of the Republic is Bangla."

After all, that sentence in the constitution of Bangladesh, is a strong argument.