Japanese expression of date (Re: use of locale in "ls")

[Tomohiro KUBOTA]

Hi,

Bruno, thank you for informing me this. :-)

At Tue, 18 Dec 2001 17:06:27 +0100 (CET),
Bruno Haible wrote:

> "ls" doesn't obey the locale any more by default. I've had a
> discussion about it with the GNU guys (see
> http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-gnu-utils/2001-December/thread.html,
> the thread with subject "ls default time style"). Paul Eggert is
> waiting for more people to express their opinion. So please, if you
> agree that "ls" in a Japanese locale should display Japanese month
> names *by default*, then make your voice heard (mail to
> address@hidden).

I use Debian GNU/Linux Sid with GNU fileutils 4.1.  The "ls" does
display Japanese month name in Japanese locale.

In Japanese, month names don't have their specific names.  Like
Korean, month names in Japanese locale database are mere combinations
of numeric letters and a unit "GATSU" which expresses "month" (just as
"kilogram" is a unit to express weight).

The expression is a bit funny because if we use a unit for month,
we also want to use a unit for day (and year).  However, I don't
think this is fatal.  It is my personal feeling and other Japanese
people may think differently.  Of course the most pleasant solution
is to display date in correct Japanese expression "%mGATSU %dNICHI"
or "%YNEN %mGATSU %dNICHI" (NEN, GATSU and NICHI should be of course
written in Ideogram).  In other words, the design of locale-dependent
items (i.e., it has names for months while it doesn't have names for
dates) is not fully international but biased to European cultures.

Korean is similar to Japanese.  In Korean, "%YNYON %mWOL %dIL"
is a correct expression, though my alphabetic transliteration of
Hangul may be wrong.  I imagine Chinese is also similar.


Offtopic:
Today we have problems which are derived from locale-sensibility
of date expression.  For example, "xplanet" displays date and time
in locale format.  However, xplanet doesn't use XFontSet and it
uses XFontStruct.  This is why xplanet cannot display Japanese
date (multibyte characters are completely broken).  I imagine
there are hundreds of softwares which have similar problem.
I think this problem is fatal but "ls" doesn't have this problem.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/