[am-translate] The name of months

[Daniel Yacob]

Tegegne,

Some quick responses while I have the moments right now.  The presentation
at the world bank went well, there was a lot of interest but the attendence
was lower than we hoped. In part this was because it was arranged very
quickly and they didn't have much time to promote it, even within the world
bank.  The time to prepare was likewise limited and I think I slept 10 hours
in 3 days.  Anyway I was to have a follow up phone conference with some of
the managers there, but that still has not happened (the US holidays interfered
some amount), so maybe this week I can talk with them.  I was waiting for
this before responding.  They plan to put the presentation online also, so
I will send a link when they post it.

"wal" is for Wolayta, somehow "Walamo" became the ISO name for the language,
there even other varients.  ISO 639-1,2 support only 7 languages of Ethiopia
if I remember correctly.  ISO 639-3 is based on the Ethnologue codes and
covers all languages, but it isn't supported by the localization infrastructure
yet.

I don't think the Rosetta or GNOME teams are working on enhanced
synchronization, it is left to the translators to update in both places.

I haven't forgotten the conversion of the AAU software glossary.  I started
it a month ago and found right away that it is 20% Unicode and 80% non-unicode
and I was having trouble exporting the data from Excel in such a way that
the non-unicode text could be converted accurately.  I need to try with an
older version of Excel but have not gotten back to it.

For calendar month names, the localized apps that apply them are mostly (all?)
doing so in calendar applications or certainly under some calendrical context.
Overloading the context of the month names where meskerem could refer to
either a European or Ethiopian month would be very hazardous and we could
never be certain what calendar system a person was referring to.

The Eritreans did drop the Ethiopic calendar and mapped the Tigrinya month
names to the Gregorian calendar.  This can be understood when dates are
restricted to an Eritrean context.  But will be confusing elsewhere.  In
Eritrea "Meskerem" is "September", legally, but in Ethiopia "Meskerem" is
only "Meskerem" and should remain the same on an computer localized for
Ethiopia.

I do not agree with all of the transcriptions of the Gregorian month names
into Amharic, I would have done them differently.  But I think any two people
would transcribe them differently.  The transcriptions though come from the
English-Amharic dictionary of Dr Amsalu Aklilu where the pronounciations are
based on British English.  They may not make perfect sense to an Ethiopian
living in Germany, France or other countries where they have some of the
same names with slightly different pronounciations.  Here though we should
target Ethiopians living in Ethiopia where English is the largest spoken
European language.  The other alternative is not to translate the Gregorian
names and let the terms default to the "fallback" language which may be
set for English, German, etc. This may not be a good option if we want to
assume an Ethiopian user does not know English.

The problem to be addressed, as I see it, is to note where calendars are
used in Ubuntu, then address those applications to support the Ethiopian
calendar. The software resources needed to support the calendar are available
but the developers have to be directed to them.  It would be good to begin
keeping notes in the wiki for what applications need to be enhanced to
support the calendar, as well as other Ethiopian conventions.

cheers,

/Daniel