Supporting en@shaw, the Shavian alphabet

Asked by Marnanel Thurman

I have been asked whether it would be possible to transliterate the English version of Ubuntu into the Shavian alphabet (the locale being "en@shaw", presumably, since "shaw" is the ISO 15924 code for the alphabet). I have some tools which will transliterate .po files automatically, using a pronunciation dictionary, as in this screenshot: http://marnanel.org/shavian/epiphany1.png . My question is whether Rosetta is an appropriate venue for a transliteration which will admittedly have only a few dozen users and which can mostly be programmatically derived from the original text (although in a few cases it will need hand-tweaking, as with the case of homophones) or whether it would be better just to build packages in my PPA. Is there a limit on how trivial a locale may be?

Some background:
The Shavian alphabet is an alternative alphabet to English designed in the 1960s. Essentially it is just another alphabet for writing English, but more regularly and in fewer characters than the standard Latin alphabet. For example, this paragraph in Shavian looks like this:

๐‘ž ยท๐‘–๐‘ฑ๐‘๐‘พ๐‘ฏ ๐‘จ๐‘ค๐‘“๐‘ฉ๐‘š๐‘ง๐‘‘ ๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ ๐‘จ๐‘ฏ ๐‘ช๐‘ค๐‘‘๐‘ป๐‘ฏ๐‘ฉ๐‘‘๐‘ฆ๐‘ ๐‘จ๐‘ค๐‘“๐‘ฉ๐‘š๐‘ง๐‘‘ ๐‘‘ ๐‘ฆ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘ฆ๐‘– ๐‘›๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ๐‘ฒ๐‘ฏ๐‘› ๐‘ฆ๐‘ฏ ๐‘ž 1960๐‘Ÿ. ๐‘ฆ๐‘•๐‘ง๐‘ฏ๐‘–๐‘ฉ๐‘ค๐‘ฐ ๐‘ฆ๐‘‘ ๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ ๐‘ก๐‘ฉ๐‘•๐‘‘ ๐‘ฉ๐‘ฏ๐‘ฉ๐‘ž๐‘ป ๐‘จ๐‘ค๐‘“๐‘ฉ๐‘š๐‘ง๐‘‘ ๐‘“๐‘น ๐‘ฎ๐‘ฒ๐‘‘๐‘ฆ๐‘™ ๐‘ฆ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘ฆ๐‘–, ๐‘š๐‘ฉ๐‘‘ ๐‘ฅ๐‘น ๐‘ฎ๐‘ง๐‘œ๐‘˜๐‘ฉ๐‘ค๐‘ป ๐‘ž๐‘จ๐‘ฏ ๐‘ž ๐‘•๐‘‘๐‘จ๐‘ฏ๐‘›๐‘ป๐‘› ๐‘ค๐‘จ๐‘‘๐‘ฉ๐‘ฏ ๐‘จ๐‘ค๐‘“๐‘ฉ๐‘š๐‘ง๐‘‘. ๐‘“๐‘น ๐‘ฆ๐‘œ๐‘Ÿ๐‘จ๐‘ฅ๐‘๐‘ฉ๐‘ค, ๐‘ž๐‘ฆ๐‘• ๐‘๐‘จ๐‘ฎ๐‘ฉ๐‘œ๐‘ฎ๐‘จ๐‘“ ๐‘ฆ๐‘ฏ ยท๐‘–๐‘ฑ๐‘๐‘พ๐‘ฏ ๐‘ค๐‘ซ๐‘’๐‘• ๐‘ค๐‘ฒ๐‘’ ๐‘ž๐‘ฆ๐‘•.

You may need a font such as http://marnanel.org/shavian/fonts/AndroclesUnicode.ttf to view this sample. Alternatively, the screenshot given above shows the alphabet well.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Launchpad itself Edit question
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No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Jeroen T. Vermeulen
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Revision history for this message
Best Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv) said :
#1

Learn something new every day! Unfortunately there are problems with this. Not any of the ones you expected: First off, support for language variants is still very rudimentary in Launchpad, and the user interface doesn't support them at all. Second, we don't support translation to English because the assumption is that that is your starting language.

We do have an approach that would solve both problems in one stroke, but with all the other stuff there is to be done, it's not on our list of priorities for the foreseeable future.

Revision history for this message
Marnanel Thurman (marnanel) said :
#2

Thanks Jeroen T. Vermeulen, that solved my question.