[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#13664) On the romanization of Japanese names

["Daniel Markstedt" <himasaram@xxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=13664 >

I do not demand this patch to be applied, please feel free to ignore 
it. The revised Japanese nation patch I posted recently was applied 
yesterday (thanks for that!) but with some changes and a long comment 
(see the japanese.ruleset file in Aug 12 CVS). Now I just want to reply 
to that comment and give my opinions and reasons.

; For cities and leaders, we use ASCII transliterations of the Japanese
; characters.  Using true Japanese (Kanji or Hiragana) is overkill for
; those used to latin characters (but would be desirable for Japanese
; players).  Other transliterations that use accented latin characters
; are also unnecessary.  Here we stick to ascii using the Hepburn
; romanization.

Why do we have to stick to plain ascii when we have unicode? Why are 
accented latin characters unnecessary when they are frequently used in, 
in particular, Scandinavian and many other North European nations (e.g. 
German, Polish etc). I never requested Japanese names to be written in 
Japanese (THAT would be overkill), I just wanted Japanese names to be 
written in correct Hepburn romanization (including the macrons). Try it 
out in the game; In my opinion the macrons look pretty nice and I doubt 
they make it more difficult to read the names.

; This is a serious problem for Japanese players since they would 
obviously
; want to see these names using their native alphabet.  The only ways to
; solve this would be to allow translation of city names (forcing 
translators
; to translate or at least wade through all of the thousands of 
available
; names) or to distribute a separate Japanese ruleset for Japanese
; players to use (which wouldn't be that hard; just substitute in the
; correct native characters, in UTF-8, into this file).
;
; This is also a problem for many other nations that use non-latin 
alphabets.

I sounds like a bad idea that different localizations of Freeciv use 
different sets of city names. Despite being a heck of task to complete, 
it could make communication between players potentially confusing: Many 
cities have different names in different languages, despite using the 
same roman letters. København is called Copenhagen in English, 
Stockholm is called Estocolmo in Spanish and Gdańsk is called Danzig in 
German. Etc. In the end, I hardly think it is a "serious problem" for 
Japanese players having to read romanized Japanese names. They are, no 
doubt, used to it.

Once again, you don't have to apply this patch. I am almost as happy 
without macrons in Freeciv as I would be with them. ;-)

/Daniel

japanese.ruleset.patch
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