[Koha] Help from people experienced in Arabic, Hebrew, and CJK languages (and Vietnamese)

[David Cook]

Thank you to everyone for your replies!

They make me think that we shouldn't be unaccenting any text, as it dramatically changes the meaning of words.

However, we should have clarified in this case that the text we're unaccenting are the names of people.

The original problem traces back to issues with diacritics in the userid: http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7411

Personally, I think we should investigate why diacritics were causing an issue in the userid, rather than unaccenting text.

However, what do people have to say about the removal of diacritics in the names of people? 

In the case of Frédéric, the diacritics are for the sake of pronunciation, and don't change the meaning of the word. That said, I'm sure there are names in French and other languages where the name is the same as a common noun and that removing the diacritics could in fact have an impact on the meaning of the name. In fact, it might have an impact to the extent that they're distinctly different words. You wouldn't write your name as "Hotel" when it's actually "Lily" (disclaimer: I didn't have a good example so this is an exaggeration). 

On the other hand, maybe people are used to writing usernames without diacritics? I think that's the real question we want to ask people.

David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St, Ultimo, NSW 2007

> -----Original Message-----
> From: enger.magnus at gmail.com [mailto:enger.magnus at gmail.com] On
> Behalf Of Magnus Enger
> Sent: Friday, 18 December 2015 12:28 AM
> To: David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au>
> Cc: Koha list <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
> Subject: Re: [Koha] Help from people experienced in Arabic, Hebrew, and
> CJK languages (and Vietnamese)
> 
> On 11 December 2015 at 01:32, David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au>
> wrote:
> > I'm curious about Danish and other Scandinavian languages as well, as å
> may be equivalent to "aa" but not "a", I think?
> 
> I dunno much about those other languages, but at least for Norwegian you
> are right. In older writings å might be written as aa. So in the interests of
> comprehensiveness, it would certainly be interesting to treat aa and å as
> synonymous.
> 
> Treating a and å as synonymous would mostly be a disaster, I think.
> You want to be able to distinguish between e.g. "make" (spous) and "måke"
> (sea gull).
> 
> Best regards,
> Magnus Enger
> Libriotech