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Matthew Slyman has become quite the Blog commenter recently, giving Yuhong Bao a run for his money! Some of his recent comments from The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 4 (working beyond one's bugs, and the case for an MSKLC update) : @MichaelKaplan: > "The trouble is that it only...

When is it a dialect, and when is it a language? I know, I know. " A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. " Or as the Yiddish linguist I'm about to lovingly misquote might say: אײ סובקולטור איז אַ שפּראַך מיט אַן אַרמײ און אַ פֿלאָט But what if the navy isn't used, the army doesn...

One of the tags I use on some of the blogs in this Sorting it all Out Blog is Linguistic Like all armchair linguists, I have no problem saying something is linguistic, without trying to formally define what I mean when I use the term. It's like porn, in a way. I know it when I see it. You know...

A couple of days ago, friend and colleague from Microsoft Damit Senanayake put a link up on my Facebook wall (timeline?) written by friend and colleague from Unicode Tex Texin: Tex's Internationalization for Turkish: Dotted and Dotless Letter "I" sells itself short by summarizing itself as a ...

I've talked about Word's "Smart Quotes" many times over the years, in blogs like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one . Oh, and then there's this other one . I like that last one best since Gwyneth from Office gave me that cool table from some version of Word or another...

Short date formats, as a general rule, are pretty consistent. They always have a d or a dd . And not a ddd or a dddd . Which is just another way of saying that we have 6 or 06 , but never Sat or Saturday . They always have an m or mm . And not an mmm or an mmmm . Which is just another way...

'Michael, how do I support GB 18030 ?!?' This is a problem that has been played over email messages to me many times since 2005 (when GB18030 was first released). Someone (in this case a developer named Carla) has been given the assignment to support the standard, due to plans to start shipping...

The other day, in Microsoft Word: 15 -- Microsoft Windows: 0 , I wrote about a case where everyone ignored Windows and did their own thing. Generally speaking, what Word in particular did was useful to more people than it wasn't. But over in the Suggestion Box, Ernst Tremel asked: I made a Keyboard...

Like this bit from Pulp Fiction: "Do you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Paris?" "They don't call it a quarter pounder with cheese?" "They have the metric system. they don't know what the *** a quarter pounder is." This change, something that McDonald's knew and Vincent...

I have a song running through my head right now - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) , the original version recorded by The Four Lads : The lyrics are something like this: Istanbul was Constantinople Now it's Istanbul not Constantinople Been a long time gone Old Constantinople's still has Turkish...

This was going to be the month. The month to break the six year streak. The streak where every month at least one person sent me email about a particular issue. And then, a few hours ago, Marcus messed that up. His email in part read: My code for dealing with the Japanese calendar has...

Generally speaking, everyone knows software has bugs. There is one class of bugs that, while important to fix, won't mislead or cause wrong decisions to be made. Like this one that just came in: I noticed the prices of these apps are listed in reverse order in Windows 2012 Arabic LPK. For...

Previous parts in the series: part 1: Working Together on Gadugi part 2: Let's talk about the keyboards! Over on the Micriosoft Language Portal Blog , colleague Palle Petersen mentioned on December 21st Windows 8 now available in Cherokee : Windows 8 became available in Cherokee this...

Previous parts in the series: part 1: Working Together on Gadugi We have some important rules regarding keyboard layout coverage of fonts we ship with Windows. Now the rules were not broadly applied when locale coverage was not impacted until Windows 8/Server 2012 - discussed further in...

Today's blog is guest written by Simon Daniels, and is one of a multi-part series about the Windows 8 Cherokee Language Interface Pack. Enjoy! Microsoft first supported Cherokee in Windows Vista by including Plantagenet Cherokee, a typeface designed by Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks. Plantagenet...

Back in 2006, I put my extreme example string in the blog More on cursor support: the rest of the answer . Many people, even native speakers of bidirectional languages and scripts who do not really know about Unicode or the UBA, find it to be confusing. Now those native speakers of bidirectional...

First, a few prior blogs so you can understand where I'm heading today: Vietnamese is a complex language on Windows On my "Vietnamese Plus" and "pseudo-Form V" constructs What's the difference between Tiếng Việt, Tiếng Việt, and Tiếng Việt? (other than the obvious, I mean) How...

Previous blogs from this series: part 26 (Hey Windows 8, there's someone on the phone for you.) part 25 (Something old, something new, something repurposed, and something...) part 24 (I Adar you! Hell, I Double Adar you! - Windows 8 ed.) part 23 (Tamazight? Outta sight!) part 22 (Digit...

Today's regular blog is being preempted by something fellow Softie David Monk passed to me via Facebook. Great guy, om time to time and I've worked on stuff in Windows frwith his wife (Stephanie). Both cool people, very professional. :-) Anyway, he forwarded me this article: McDonald’s...

It was about six weeks ago (give or take) that I blogged 'Because even if the new standard is perfect, most people don't like things changed out from under them' . about the new Hebrew keyboard in Windows 8. And about some of the problems that I noticed in it. Anyway, the Hebrew National Standard...

I'm a little annoyed right now. Allow me to explain. :-) First, the story: The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 6: Behind the Cherokee Phonetic layout in Windows 8 The On-Screen Keyboard vs the Touch Keyboard: 2 very different Windows 8 things… Can't Touch This! (unless...

The other day my blog The Locales of Windows 8, not yet divvied up... went up. Some people made observations. Some people asked questions. A few of them even did all that in the comments.... Like Andrew West , who commented: I've said it before, and I'll say it one last time, I think the...

You may remember prior blogs like Regarding the overthinking and underimplementing of names from last year that talks a bit about the names we cart around or Maybe they're just showing off their fancy fonts? ;-) from a few months ago that openly pointed out one of the big problems of using native languge...

The other day, I was asked whether Windows supports all 22 of the Eighth Schedule languages in the Constitution of India. You know, these 22 languages: Assamese Bengali Bodo Dogri Gujarati Hindi Kannada Kashmiri Konkani...

The question asked by someone internally was: Are East Asian script languages considered to be complex script languages? Well, I suppose it would depend on both one's definition of "East Asian script languages" and "complex script languages", really. If I use the Microsoft definition of Complex...