What is en_US ?

[William Case]

Hi;

I know this thread is a bit of flame bait, or perhaps more correctly, a
bit of mild teasing, however on a practical note that could be mistaken
for a philosophical one ....

On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 17:47 +0300, Markku Kolkka wrote:
> Timothy Murphy kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika keskiviikko 13 
> kesäkuu 2007):
> > I'd like to enter a small caveat
> > about the use of the description "en_US"
> > when there is no other version of English on offer,
> > eg when installing Fedora.
> 
> Fedora actually supports en_AU, en_BW, en_CA, en_DK, en_GB, 
> en_HK, en_IE, en_IN, en_NZ, en_PH, en_SG, en_US, en_ZA and en_ZW 
> locales. If you need to pick one variant as a default, en_US is 
> reasonable because it has the largest number of users (AFAIK). 
> 
> > First of all, the difference between different variants of
> > English is negligible, in my opinion.
> > I never heard of anyone misunderstanding something
> > because it was in en_US rather than in en_GB.
> 
> The locales cover a lot more than just spelling, e.g. date/time 
> and numeric formatting. I guess that labeling money amounts 
> with "$" would irritate en_GB users more than spelling "humour" 
> as "humor". 
> 
> -- 
>  Markku Kolkka
>  markku.kolkka at iki.fi
> 

computers offer an opportunity to support diversity in a progressively
more global and unified world.  Recognizing differences between en_US,
en_Can, en_AU and en_UK is just one of these comforting manifestations.

I personally await the day when usable (not necessarily perfect)
computer translations from language to language is no more difficult
than an ordinary spellcheck.

-- 
Regards Bill