python documents in chinese,Python，荷兰语，英语，中文，日语等

The never-ending debate about PEP 3131 got me thinking

about natural languages with respect to Python, and I

have a bunch of mostly simple observations (some

factual, some anecdotal). I present these mostly as

food for thought, but I do make my own

continent-by-continent recommendations at the bottom

of the email. (My own linguistic biases are also

disclosed at the bottom of the email.)

Nationality of various technologists who use English

to some degree (keywords in their languages, etc.):

van Rossum -- Dutch-born, now lives in California

Wall -- American

Matz -- Japanese

Ritchie -- American

Stroustroup -- Danish-born, lives in Texas

Gosling -- Canadian

McCarthy -- American

Torvalds -- Finnish-born (but family spoke

Swedish), lives in Oregon

Stallman -- American

Berners-Lee -- English-born, did major work in

Geneva

A sampling of largish countries where English is

fairly widely known:

United States (82% of inhabitants speak it at

home), Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, South

Africa, India

about China:

largest country in the world by population

Mandarin Chinese has 850 million speakers

written Chinese dates back 4000 years, employs

5000 characters

about India:

second largest country in the world by population

official languages: Hindi, English, and 21 others

major software outsourcing center (anecdotal)

Hindi is Indo-European language with distinctively

different alphabet from English

about Japan:

10th largest population

world leader in robotics

Japanese language mostly spoken in Japan

major linguistic influences: Chinese, English,

Dutch

kanji = Chinese characters

hiragana and katakana -- syllabic scripts

Latin alphabet often used in modern Japanese (see

wikipedia)

some European alphabets:

Spanish -- accented, includes digraphs ch and ll

German -- accented

French -- accented

Italian -- accented, no J/K/W/X/Y

Bringing Python to the world (all opinion here):

Even in English-speaking countries, Python is

greatly underutilized.

Even in environments where programmers commonly use

ASCII encoding, Python is greatly underutilized.

Any focus on the current English/ASCII bias of

Python should mostly concern Asia, due its large

population, the 80/20 rule, the prevalence of

different writing systems in large Asian countries,

Asia''s influence on technology in general, etc. (not

to mention Ruby!)

Asia:

Python should be *completely* internationalized for

Mandarin, Japanese, and possibly Hindi and Korean.

Not just identifiers. I''m talking the entire

language, keywords and all.

Europe:

Lobby EU for more funding for PyPy. Promote

cultural acceptance of English-ized spelling in the

context of writing software programs.

North America:

Marketing, marketing, marketing.

South America:

Focus first on translating Python documents, books,

etc. to Spanish.

Africa:

write Python code for the XO-1 (aka $100 laptop)

Australia:

no worries

Antartica:

more Penguins than people

My linguistic biases:

1) I speak American English natively.

2) I live in a very multilingual city.

3) I took 6 years of French in high school, but I

get very little exposure to the language in my

day-to-day life.

4) I hear a LOT of Spanish in day-to-day life, and

I have first semester literacy.

5) I have never learned Arabic, Mandarin,

Japanese, just to name a few major world languages.

6) I have written software that has been

translated from English to other languages, but I only

once been the primary person to do the actual

internationalization, and it was a small project.

7) Lots of U.S.-based programmers that I have

worked with speak English as their second or third

language.

__________________________________________________ __________________________________

Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search

that gives answers, not web links.

http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/on...h?refer=1ONXIC

解决方案100 laptop)

Australia:

no worries

Antartica:

more Penguins than people

My linguistic biases:

1) I speak American English natively.

2) I live in a very multilingual city.

3) I took 6 years of French in high school, but I

get very little exposure to the language in my

day-to-day life.

4) I hear a LOT of Spanish in day-to-day life, and

I have first semester literacy.

5) I have never learned Arabic, Mandarin,

Japanese, just to name a few major world languages.

6) I have written software that has been

translated from English to other languages, but I only

once been the primary person to do the actual

internationalization, and it was a small project.

7) Lots of U.S.-based programmers that I have

worked with speak English as their second or third

language.

__________________________________________________ __________________________________

Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search

that gives answers, not web links.

http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/on...h?refer=1ONXIC

Steve Howell

>about Japan:

major linguistic influences: Chinese, English,

Dutch

English and Dutch are minor linguistic influences.

kanji = Chinese characters

hiragana and katakana -- syllabic scripts

Latin alphabet often used in modern Japanese (see

wikipedia)

The Latin alphabet is generally only used for western or westernized

names, like Sony.

>Asia:

Python should be *completely* internationalized for

Mandarin, Japanese, and possibly Hindi and Korean.

Not just identifiers. I''m talking the entire

language, keywords and all.

This would be more convincing if it came from someone who spoke Mandarin,

Japanese, Hindi or Korean.

btw. Mandarin is a spoken dialect Chinese, what you''re actually asking

for is a Simplified-Chinese version of Python.

Ross Ridge

--

l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU

[oo][oo] rr****@csclub.uwaterloo.ca

-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/

db //

Steve Howell je napisao/la:

some European alphabets:

Spanish -- accented, includes digraphs ch and ll

German -- accented

French -- accented

Italian -- accented, no J/K/W/X/Y

what about slavic languages?

in croatian you have five accented letters plus three letters for

digrahps. russian, bulgarian, serbian, macedonian, ukranian etc. use

cyrilic alphabet (lets not forget that russia isn''t that small -

around 150 million people), polish also has some of its own

characters...

all in all, it is estimated that some 400 million people speak slavic

languages...