Language poll

What language is your native language?


  • Total voters
    114

I have to say, I really dislike the way the forum's poll software displays percentages of multiple choice poll options.  (55 votes out of 57 voters should be shown as 96.49%, not 61.11%)  

(Incidentally it seems two voters are not being totally honest...  if they are on this forum then they obviously do use English "to some extent") ;)

- Neelix
 
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
Sure.  Also Portuguese was just an (extreme) example. The same thing applies to the other languages.
 
They could be auto-translating the options. Its possible to find out who it is too.
That occurred to me after I posted.   Possible to find out, yes,  but given that that line was mostly meant as a joke, I don't actually care enough about it to go to the effort.  :)

- 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.
The comparison is something you equate to something that is perceptual and beside the point of the product. And then you exchange the product for something irrelevant to the topic.

International support exists on its own accord, because its selling extra devices. If it didnt exist we also wouldnt have it, but id like to side with rationality and say its because international support means support of many things, rather than just one.

We dont know that any particular brand of cereal fares better or worse, since its an image-thing. There is no control-group cereal with just the colour changed on the market. When that stops being the case for international support and devices, you would have to look evidece not stemming from its rightful place in the market.

I think the burden of proof is contained within the notion.

If international-support sold less devices, which can be the case, its for the same reasons it sells more. It is incompatible between regions. So if you make more than you should of one thing, it can potentially sell less, because you have tied your available devices for sale, to an estimate that could not hold true. Since it has this inherent problem, its another reason why it wouldnt exist over time, if not for selling more devices. Correlation does not imply causation, but that is my assumption. Interestingly, you can tailor the default to be a non-incompatible as possible.

There is an important distinction between lumping international support onto English, being the default, and having international support within English.

One is less compatible with english because it adds foreign stuff. You can do that once, or all over the place. (option here being the fullest possible keyboard)

International                                English+option

regionalized-International         English+option made into printed keymat            

Dual-regional                              English+german

Regional                                       English - option

Dual-regional+multi regional   English+german + many foreign letters

Multi-regional                               English-option+ many foreign letters

From the point of view of having one default keymat, international is best, because then you can make regionalized-international, which is for international users equivalent to English+option for English-speakers.

Spanish is largely irrelevant to them, so you would have to do a less frequent language for Dual regionalized. It is not equivalent to international regionalized because Italian and German arent QWERTY. We can imply hidden AltGr level for this reason, since it is always preferable in some way for both camps.

Regional (English only) is not equivalent to international even for English people, because then the English dont get their "option".

From the point of view of having mutually exclusive regionally familiar symbol-placement between different keymats, i dont think its worth maintaining many software-layouts over, it hast the optential to cause problems. And also I assume there to be one default.

When the default can work with so minimal changes for international users, i think its worth giving up half the english symbol-placement for. Most notably because its not possible to preserve it without also losing numbers for all.

Edit: As support argument, see also why dedicated letters always beat language-modifiers.

And why dedicated buttons or dedicated diactrics, alongside full dead-key diactrics,  is preferable to no dedicated buttons and dedicated diactrics by default.
 
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japanese.
Out of interest what kind of support for Japanese input are you looking for here?   Just  the inclusion of specific keys or modifiers?  Japanese symbols on the keys?   Do you think there'd be a big enough market for the Pyra in Japan to justify an alternate keymat with Japanese key labels?

- Neelix
 
The comparison is something you equate to something that is perceptual and beside the point of the product. And then you exchange the product for something irrelevant to the topic.

International support exists on its own accord, because its selling extra devices. If it didnt exist we also wouldnt have it, but id like to side with rationality and say its because international support means support of many things, rather than just one.

We dont know that any particular brand of cereal fares better or worse, since its an image-thing. There is no control-group cereal with just the colour changed on the market. When that stops being the case for international support and devices, you would have to look evidece not stemming from its rightful place in the market.

I think the burden of proof is contained within the notion.

If international-support sold less devices, which can be the case, its for the same reasons it sells more. It is incompatible between regions. So if you make more than you should of one thing, it can potentially sell less, because you have tied your available devices for sale, to an estimate that could not hold true.
My point was semantic. The actual example used is irrelevant. It could be about exploding stars, rotating squirrels or derailing threads.

You now claim that "International support exists on its own accord, because its selling extra devices". Are you sure those same devices would not be sold if the device was not localized? How large portion of the people would not buy the device? Do you have anything to back this causal relation up other than your own words?
 
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I picked only English for everything, but I want to clarify.  

I do occasionally use spanish words and names, however I either misspell what needs other characters using only English letters, or I copy or otherwise get what I need.  I rarely use words and names from other languages, however most of the time I can just copy those, as I am usually making reference to, or quoting, something.

Ideally I would like the Pyra to support every living written language on Earth, and dead ones that are referenced frequently.  From a more realistic perspective, most European languages should be supported in some way.

For personal use I only need English.
 
thatgui and notaz: what is your native language?

Somehow I think it would be nice if notaz could write his native language on the Pyra :)
 
The comparison is something you equate to something that is perceptual and beside the point of the product. And then you exchange the product for something irrelevant to the topic.


International support exists on its own accord, because its selling extra devices. If it didnt exist we also wouldnt have it, but id like to side with rationality and say its because international support means support of many things, rather than just one.


We dont know that any particular brand of cereal fares better or worse, since its an image-thing. There is no control-group cereal with just the colour changed on the market. When that stops being the case for international support and devices, you would have to look evidece not stemming from its rightful place in the market.


I think the burden of proof is contained within the notion.


If international-support sold less devices, which can be the case, its for the same reasons it sells more. It is incompatible between regions. So if you make more than you should of one thing, it can potentially sell less, because you have tied your available devices for sale, to an estimate that could not hold true.
My point was semantic. The actual example used is irrelevant. It could be about exploding stars, rotating squirrels or derailing threads.


You now claim that "International support exists on its own accord, because its selling extra devices". Are you sure those same devices would not be sold if the device was not localized? How large portion of the people would not buy the device? Do you have anything to back this causal relation up other than your own words?
Aside from its existance, and the inherent drawback in it, we can compare laptops against the pandora marketbase.

The pandora should figuratively do better in scandinavia and Spain. We can deduct that some of it comes from distribution, but there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of sales compared to laptop-distribution. What separates laptops from the pandora is the language support.

Both the gp2x and pandora was made as something initially, and then made to be something else by the time its replacement came along.

My personal feeling is that the market for the gp2x was largely carried by the novelty of linux back in 2006 or so. The pandora took great strides, but I feel expectancy is even higher now.

There has also been a continuing trend of convergence in the market. Handheld devices aren't doubling for desktop computers yet, but atleast we can see tablets/mp3-players/cameras morphing in with phones. I think that is a very exciting prospect which puts it in a whole new light, but also that the desktop OS works better for hooking up to a big screen, replacing a desktop isnt its forse, but it can ideally be all things for all people, more of the time that way.

I expect a "full keyboard" a figure of speech we use to differentiate between A-Z and A-Z+extra letters. That has been mentioned by every person that should have been a pandora user that ive talked to.

Also the plastic should improve, but that looks like its being fixed.

With the continued maturity of desktop linux, what stands between the pyra and being adaptable to a generic audience is the keyboard.
 
but there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of sales compared to laptop-distribution. What separates laptops from the pandora is the language support.
Oh you mean, apart from the larger screen, larger keyboard, much higher processing speed, larger amount of RAM and the x86 compatibility ? :p
 
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I already have a laptop, and a desktop, and a smartphone without buttons.

Replacing the smartphone and much of the need of the laptop only happens once i can use the keyboard for writing language. In a pinch i can "replace" a desktop too, atleast use it for that purpose.
 
With 83 votes in, this is the preliminary result:

  • 92.7% wants English support
  • 33.7% wants German support
  • 18.1% wants French support
  • 15.7% wants Spanish support
  • 12.0% wants Italian support
  • 10.8% wants Scandinavian support (perhaps I should have grouped it different and put the Finns with the Germans because öä is enough for them)
  • 8.4% wants Dutch support
  • 4.8% wants Portuguese support
  • 4.8% wants Balto-Slavic support
  • 3.6% wants something else
Now if we assume that if some language is supported, then the 'more important' languages are also supported, then we get the following letter/diacritics requirements:

  • English: A-Z
  • German: add üöäß
  • French: add àèéç (ù)  and ¨ ˆ for âêîôû ëï
  • Spanish: add ñ (¿¡) and ´ for áíóú
  • Italian: add ìò (or just ` )
  • Scandinavian: no extra needs for Finnish, å for Swedish, åøæ for Norwegian/Danish
  • Dutch: no extra needs
  • Portuguese: add ˜ for ãõ
  • Balto-Slavic: add ˇ for čšž řďťňľě, and also  ˛ for ąęįų and ¸ for şģķļņţ (these two can be combined as one diacritic for ogonek/cedilla/comma), · for żė, ° for ů (these two could be combined as one diacritic for dot above and ring), Ł (Polish only), Đ (Serbo-Croatian only), ˝ for őű (Hungarian only), ¯ for āēīōū (Latvian/Lithuanian only)
 
French people can not use ´ for é ? Why not ` to manually input àè? The same for üöä with ¨. Maybe I lost something but we have 390 threads about keyboard and I am a little lost long time ago
 
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French people can not use ´ for é ? Why not ` to manually input àè? The same for üöä with ¨. Maybe I lost something but we have 390 threads about keyboard and I am a little lost long time ago

Yes, that is possible, but it is less efficient since you have to press two keys for one letter. German keyboards have dedicated keys for üöä, French keyboards have dedicated keys for éèàç, and there's a good reason for that: in French, the letter é is more frequent than v, h, g, f, b, q, j, x, z, y, k, w (source), so if all those letters have a dedicated key, then why not é?


In German it is a bit less important to have efficient access üäöß, since those are not that frequent (but still more frequent than j, y, x, q; source).


It's a bit arbitrary where to draw the line in these things. For example, in many languages, J is not that common (e.g. in English, J is used 10 times less frequently than the É in French), and since J is in a sense just an I with a hook-below diacritic, so you could also ask: can't English people just use   ̡ + I  for J ? ;)

(to be clear: that was a joke, just to make my point)
 
Its very easy to draw the line at ability, we can, at most, offer 4 keys that arent A-Z. Another important aspect of dedicated keys is that its the expected behaviour.

Imagine a a big building, all the doors swing one way, but one of them go the opposite way. Its used very seldom, but it never fails to annoy new users. Its inefficient for the people who are used to it too, but they mostly excuse it, because they think its supposed to be that way.
 
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