Language poll

What language is your native language?


  • Total voters
    114

_wb_

Microbe
Staff member
Joined
Apr 5, 2012
Messages
5,390
Age
42
Location
Brussels, Belgium
This is just to get an idea of the languages used by people in this community, and the desires people have for the Pyra.
 
Support: english, spain, german, french.

Since the above include many symbols of other languages which need just one or two additional symbols, Id say support even more!
 
Oh man, looks like i am a minority here. Guess i could manually deal with Cyrlic text by myself, that's something somewhat managable on Linux, but just how much of an issue can it become (in theory) when it comes to doing the same on the Pyra?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Oh man, looks like a i am a minority here. Guess i could manually deal with Cyrlic text by myself, that's something somewhat managable on Linux. But just how much of an issue can it become (in theory) when it comes to doing the same on the Pyra?
Oh, you are using a non-Latin-script Balto-Slavic language? Which one? Russian?

The Pyra will not have enough keys to conveniently map a standard ЙЦУКЕН layout, but I guess you could use the phonetic layout.
 
The "яверт" layout looks kind of awkward to use, but i guess i will have to make it work. If anything i will just use an on-screen keyboard or something (Man..).

Anyway, do you know if any of the alternative Russian layouts ("яверт", "яжерт" etc') will be available by default in the Pyra's Linux distro? or will i have to manually configure them?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The "яверт" layout looks kind of awkward to use, but i guess i will have to make it work. If anything i will just use an on-screen keyboard or something (Man..).

Anyway, do you know if any of the alternative Russian layouts ("яверт", "яжерт" etc') will be available by default in the Pyra's Linux distro, or will i have to manually configure them?
Chances are that something will already be available, but how useful it will be in the context of the downscaled Pyra keyboard, I dunno. Most likely at some point some amount of manual configuration/tweaking for Russian layouts will have to be done by someone, possibly you :)
 
By "supported" I mean "at least mappable to a sane non-used single-shoulder-modifier combo".

(Oh, and as long as german is supported I'm good. Å is in finnish alphabet pretty much only because we have two official languages: finnish and swedish. I use swedish about as often as I release a new original game :p )
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Not that it really affects me, but why doesn't the second question cover all the languages or language groups that the other questions do?  

- Neelix
 
Good idea.

Looking at this completely egocentrical I voted for just having English support.

Adding the diacritics used in dutch would be nice but isn't a necessity.
You are forgetting how international support sells more devices. Lowering the price, and solidifying the project for yourself.

But yes, its possible to have a lot of international support without any inconvenience to the English user.

The poll just conveniently hides the difference between real keyboard support, and printing letters everywhere.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You are forgetting how international support sells more devices.
Is this a guess or a fact? If it's a fact I'd like the source for your evidence.


It's all well and good to make guesses, but please label them as such: "You are forgetting how international support may sell more devices."
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Good idea.

Looking at this completely egocentrical I voted for just having English support.

Adding the diacritics used in dutch would be nice but isn't a necessity.
You are forgetting how international support sells more devices. Lowring the price, and solidifying the project for yourself.

But yes, its possible to have a lot of international support without any inconvenience to the English user.

The poll just conveniently hides the difference between real keyboard support, and printing letters everywhere.
For the purposes of this poll, that's completely irrelevant.   The objective of this poll is to collect real data on language usage in the community,  which means individual participants need to answer the questions honestly and egocentrically in order to provide an accurate overall picture collectively.

- Neelix
 
Which is a level of arbitration from the actual choices, and such a convoluted way of asking, you get no sane results.

I voted against "scandinavian" which isnt a language, or a group of languages, just because I see the benefit in not bothering people at large with scandinavian-centric letters. And because there is better use for hidden symbols.

If you want pandora-numbers, Eki's research, I don't understand why that isn't valid. For language-demographics, use wikipedia. From the results, this is the market:

In numbers of inhabitants speaking language, numbers in millions.

226 Englishspeaking Americans
60 Englishspeakers in the UK
19 Englishspeakers in AUS

+canada +ireland +NZ
 
93.5 German speakers 80 Germans 7.5 Austria 5.5 Swiss 0.5 luxembourg
66 French-speaking people in France (More other places)

46 Spaniards in Spain
19 Lower german scandinavians (5M Norwegian, 5.5M Danish, 9.2M Swedish)
23 Dutch-speakers (16.5 holland, 6.5 belgium)
5.4 Finnish-speakers in Finland (more other places)

B-zar: As you may have noted, i didnt say "will" because i dont know that any devices will be sold at all.

What I do know is that international support exists to sell more devices, otherwise it wouldn't.

Edit: Maybe the question should have been raised in a parallel control-group universe where the pandora had support for German.

If you count the votes, non-English is the bigger group still. 28 vs 21 currently. And of that 28, German is dominating with 12. Over half that of english. 17 if you count types of German.

If we factor in that there is now German centric distribution, rather than mainly UK and German, it is likely that the numbers will be shifted toward the side of mainland Europe.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Not that it really affects me, but why doesn't the second question cover all the languages or language groups that the other questions do?  

- Neelix
Yeah I was a bit lazy there. The goal of the first question is to get info about the first language, the goal of the second question is to get info about 2nd (or 3rd, 4th) languages. I made the sweeping assumption that those other languages (missing from the 2nd question) mostly have native speakers, so it would just be a duplication of the first question. That assumption is false, of course. I could change the poll, but it's a bit late for that.

As expected, English is dominating.
Maybe you should ask this question on the german forums ;)
Obviously this poll is biased towards English since this is an English forum where everyone writes in English and the questions are in English so you need to understand English (at least to some extent) in order to be able to participate in the poll.

Doing the poll on the German forums would of course create an even bigger bias.

Also note that there are always two ways to look at the results from a poll like this: (I'm taking the example of Portuguese now)

  • We could say: "Clearly Portuguese is not important because nobody in the community uses it, so we shouldn't support it."
  • We could say: "Clearly this community could be bigger in Portugal and Brazil, because Portuguese has 265 million native speakers (cf. English has ~400 million, German has 95 million) yet nobody in the poll speaks Portuguese. So we should certainly support Portuguese well, in order to attract more Portuguese speakers."

I personally tend to prefer the second way of looking at things.
 
Also note that there are always two ways to look at the results from a poll like this: (I'm taking the example of Portuguese now)

  • We could say: "Clearly Portuguese is not important because nobody in the community uses it, so we shouldn't support it."
  • We could say: "Clearly this community could be bigger in Portugal and Brazil, because Portuguese has 265 million native speakers (cf. English has ~400 million, German has 95 million) yet nobody in the poll speaks Portuguese. So we should certainly support Portuguese well, in order to attract more Portuguese speakers."
I personally tend to prefer the second way of looking at things.

Well that's all very optimistic,  but there is no evidence that giving better Portuguese language support would be enough to break into the Portuguese or Brazilian markets. In order to make that kind of decision a lot more information is needed.   Perhaps there are other factors involved like (for example) prohibitive import taxes that would make it a wasted effort.    Perhaps Alerino would have a better insight.    I'm not saying you shouldn't make provisions for it,  but I certainly wouldn't make it a priority based on the outcome of this poll so far.


- Neelix
 
B-zar: As you may have noted, i didnt say "will" because i dont know that any devices will be sold at all.
No, you just stated "sells", implying there is precedence or other evidence. Consider the difference between "Bright colors sell more cereal", "Bright colors may sell more cereal" and "Bright colors will sell more cereal". The first implies a known phenomenon or correlation that provides reasonable evidence for a belief that bright colors will sell more cereal. The second implies some existing rationale it could happen, but no evidence. The third implies some well known and reliably repeatable mechanism that forces more cereal being sold.
 
I thought that the Linux/RegExp characters will be included by default, why are them too in this poll ?
 
Not that it really affects me, but why doesn't the second question cover all the languages or language groups that the other questions do?  

- Neelix
Yeah I was a bit lazy there. The goal of the first question is to get info about the first language, the goal of the second question is to get info about 2nd (or 3rd, 4th) languages. I made the sweeping assumption that those other languages (missing from the 2nd question) mostly have native speakers, so it would just be a duplication of the first question. That assumption is false, of course. I could change the poll, but it's a bit late for that.

As expected, English is dominating.
Maybe you should ask this question on the german forums ;)
Obviously this poll is biased towards English since this is an English forum where everyone writes in English and the questions are in English so you need to understand English (at least to some extent) in order to be able to participate in the poll.

Doing the poll on the German forums would of course create an even bigger bias.

Also note that there are always two ways to look at the results from a poll like this: (I'm taking the example of Portuguese now)

  • We could say: "Clearly Portuguese is not important because nobody in the community uses it, so we shouldn't support it."
  • We could say: "Clearly this community could be bigger in Portugal and Brazil, because Portuguese has 265 million native speakers (cf. English has ~400 million, German has 95 million) yet nobody in the poll speaks Portuguese. So we should certainly support Portuguese well, in order to attract more Portuguese speakers."

I personally tend to prefer the second way of looking at things.
Most brazilians are not allowed to travel freely within their own country. If you want to compare them to Germans, the number has to be cut by two decimal-points.

The country has a insane amount of toll-protection, and vehemently fights import of foreign products in favour of its own.

Portugal has the financial power of a self-sustaining farmer. Lets be honest, if the pyra is to cater to anyone in these countries, it should be covered in gold first and foremost.

On the language-side, it is difficult.

In my head, the focus should first be directed toward the current marketgroup, in trying to do better at that. Meaning bumping German, Spanish, Italian and French, up from third rate to second class citizens.

Different rules apply these inter-lingual languages.

If that works, give them keymats. Minimal risk.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top