Text in UI, we do not understand

l10n
#1

“Modifier Tone Letters” is a Unicode block. See this for more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_letter

Regards

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
The wikipedia page about "Modifier Tone Letters" says
"Modifier Tone Letters is a Unicode block containing tone markings for Chinese, Chinantec, Africanist, and other phonetic transcriptions. It does not contain the standard IPA tone marks, which are found in Spacing Modifier Letters."
but i still don't understand what it means.  More to the point i don't see how to cut it down to just a couple of words that do make sense.

I like Alan Monfort's link for "Elements Dock", seeing it makes it easier to understand.
http://openoffice.sblo.jp/article/68846438.html

I liked Mateusz Zasuwik's explanation of "Elements dock" as meaning "Show/embed window with Math's elements" and having a link helped too

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.1#Math

Khagaroth's explanation about "Purple pipe" helped a bit but i didn't understand what "a gradient name" was until seeing the context by following his path
"You can find in Draw under Format -> Page -> Background."
But it still doesn't really explain what a pipe is.  My guess is that purple would be on one side of the page and some other colour on the other side and they would somehow merge or fade into each other in the middle?

Regards from

Tom :slight_smile:

#3

They are diacritic marks that mark tone in tonal languages, so there's "squiggles" that go above or beside another letter to indicate if it's a high rising tone, a low rising tone, a mid level tone, and so on. There's a better pdf here which actually displays them
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UA700.pdf

So saying it in long it would be "Linguistic symbols for marking tone in tone languages that modify another letter (usually a vowel)"

Michael

13/07/2013 12:21, sgrìobh Tom Davies:

#4

Thanks for bringing this up, Tom. For now, I’ve translated “Purple
pipe” literally (‘Tubería púrpura’ in Spanish), with the hope that
people will understand what the “pipe” is by seeing the gradient
preview first.

Regards!

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
Thanks :)  So it's something that doesn't happen in English so there isn't really a good name for it?  So in other languages it might be easier to shorten it to something that makes more sense to people?

Your original explanation makes a lot of sense;
"diacritic marks that mark tone in tonal languages, so there's "squiggles" that go above or beside another letter to indicate if it's a high rising tone, a low rising tone, a mid level tone, and so on."
I know exactly what you mean by that because i have seen such marks in many other languages.  The technically correct and more official line
"Linguistic symbols for marking tone in tone languages that modify another letter (usually a vowel)"
still leaves the meaning unclear.  In the 1st line, even though i don't know what "diacritic" means you explain that well by using the word "squiggles" which is much friendlier.  So, i feel i learned something even though the 1st description is still quite short even if it's not short enough.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

13/07/2013 15:32, sgrìobh Tom Davies:

Hi :slight_smile:
Thanks :slight_smile: So it's something that doesn't happen in English so there isn't really a good name for it?

Not unless English develops a complex tone system. It's possible of course but not in the next 100 years I'd say.

So in other languages it might be easier to shorten it to something that makes more sense to people?

I guess so. It's the old question of how freely to translate. It's technically the name of a code range in Unicode (like Latin 1 or IPA Extensions) but I think translating this so it makes sense in to the user is more important than sticking to the exact Unicode range name.

Your original explanation makes a lot of sense;
"diacritic marks that mark tone in tonal languages, so there's "squiggles" that go above or beside another letter to indicate if it's a high rising tone, a low rising tone, a mid level tone, and so on."
I know exactly what you mean by that because i have seen such marks in many other languages. The technically correct and more official line
"Linguistic symbols for marking tone in tone languages that modify another letter (usually a vowel)"
still leaves the meaning unclear. In the 1st line, even though i don't know what "diacritic" means you explain that well by using the word "squiggles" which is much friendlier. So, i feel i learned something even though the 1st description is still quite short even if it's not short enough.

Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

You're welcome :slight_smile:

Michael