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Posted by Toby A Inkster on 04/11/07 11:36
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Scripsit Toby A Inkster:
>
>> Bilingual is a special case of multilingual.
>
> Not really; "bi-" means "two", "multi-" means many.
"Multi-" means "multiple", as opposed to individual.
It comes from the Latin "multus" which is often translated as "many",
simply because there's not really any more elegant way to translate it
into English. But multus is meant more in the sense of "more than one"
than the normal English connotations of "many", for which the Romans had
words such as "plus"/"pluris" and "plurimus" which would pseudo-translate
as "many-er" and "many-est" in English. The Romans had different shades of
the word "many" to play with, and "multus" is the weakest shade of it, so
could certainly apply to two.
The Greek equivalent of "multi-" is "poly-". The term "polyunsaturated" is
applied to fatty acids which contain *two* or more double-carbon bonds.
> "Two" is not really a special case of "many", except by a technical
> definition.
You're right -- "two" is not really a special case of "many" except by a
technical definition. However, "two" is a special case of "multiple".
Same with "three". Three isn't "many", but it's certainly "multiple".
"Two" is more *specific* than "multiple", but no more accurate.
> If you know just two languages
Then you know one and a half more than the average American? ;-)
> In web authoring, two languages are essentially simpler to manage than
> many languages, though this is mostly a practical issue.
In some cultures, the counting system consists of "none", "one", "two",
"many". I'd argue, and I'm sure most other programmers would agree, that
for most programming and database design purposes, people should use an
even simpler counting system: "none", "one", "many".
In database design, if you want to be able to store, say, up to two
telephone numbers for a particular contact, you ought to design your
database to be able to handle an unlimited number of telephone numbers
for each contact.
Similarly, when designing a website that covers more than one language,
you ought to code to be able to handle as many languages as the translators
can throw at you. So designing a bilingual site is simply a special case
of designing a multilingual site.
> For, say, five languages, you can still have links to versions in the
> other languages on each page. With ten languages, it becomes less
> convenient, and with fifty languages, it would be awkward - on many
> simple pages, the menu of different language versions could eat up most
> of the page visually. (So maybe then one might consider a dropdown menu
> for it - something that people all too easily start using with just a
> few choices, even on bilingual sites!)
Agreed, the method of presenting a choice of languages may need to vary
depending on the number of options (as indeed, the method of presenting a
choice of *anything* might).
But the actual method used in filing the translated text and detecting the
user's chosen language ought to be the same. You never know when you're
going to want to add more languages.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux
* = I'm getting there!
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