John McCabe-Dansted wrote:
> I also consider it strange that the language can change within a word.
Define "word" (for languages such as, say, English, German and Japanese).
> In my case \selectlanguage{american} etc. has popped up up a number of
> times, and in all cases the LaTeX I want is exactly the LaTeX that
> results when I remove \selectlanguage{[^}]*}.
>
> > However, if I copy a French sentence into an English document, I see no
> > reason whatsoever to make the sentence English. French is French and not
> > English, after all. Resetting the language would be a bug, IMHO.
>
> In my case my documents are pure English, but I might:
> 1) Copy an acronym (or character) from a French document (unlikely)
Usually, Acronyms are language-specific as well (cf. IPA [International
Phonetic Association] vs. API [Association Phonétique Internationale]).
> 2) Copy text from English US to English UK -- IMHO An English UK word
> in an English US document is actually just a poorly spelt US English
> word. Actually it is likely to even be a correctly spelt English US
> word.
Why? IMHO it is correct to keep it marked es English (UK), The author hgas to
decide if he leaves it in UK spelling or if he adapts the spelling to US
convention (and reset the language).
> In principle I may be submitting a document to an organization that
> requires that all text be in Language X (and only language X), in
> which case any LyX document I submit that contains language markup is
> wrong, just as if I had included a Chapter in an article.
But not if you use different languages (if this organization is not completely
crazy, that is).
> More likely, the receiving institution really wouldn't care whether I
> use British or American English, so long as I am consistent. So in
> this case hard-coding either British or American English would be
> fine, but allowing both is again in some sense incorrect.
But then, again, hyphenation might be just wrong.
> I note that LyX automatically removes \Chapter when pasting to an
> article. IMHO it also makes perfect sense to also remove
> "\selectlanguage{british}" "\selectlanguage{american}" etc. when
> pasting to a monolingual document. Perhaps all documents could start
> in a "defacto monolingual" state, and when the first \selectlanguage
> would be inserted the user could be asked whether they want a
> "monolingual" document or "multilingual" document. If we were to get
> fancy we could have documents where german/british are allowed but not
> american.
This is a very bad idea that will mixup any multilingual document. And, please
excuse me, it strikes me rather monolingual-English centric, while LyX aims at
being truly multilingual.
Jürgen
