invention

We've moved our translate.org.za site to run on nanoblogger which is a great improvement. So now I'm writing a plugin to handle screenshots. It's working pretty well now...

editing the screenshots plugin in vim [640x480] [800x600]

slashdot mentioned an article entitled Language may shape human thought in which a psychologist argues for a variant of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the basis of a study of the Pirah� tribe.

On closer examination his logic is fairly interesting ... extracts from the article illustrate this:

• "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirah� need to count" explains Gordon
• The language, Pirah�, is known as a "one, two, many" language because it only contains words for "one" and "two" - for all other numbers, a single word for "many" is used.
• In order to test if this prevented members of the tribe from perceiving higher numbers, Gordon set seven Pirah� a variety of tasks.
• For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon's pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.
• Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

None of this (at least in the article) contains any justification as to why the perceived lack of the Pirah� to compare numbers of objects comes from the lack of number words in their language, rather than from the fact that they never need to count in daily life by Gordon's own explanation.

Finally finished the OpenOffice.org multilanguage builds, as in we have a master CD ready.

This involved doing stuff to make it add menu items to KDE and Gnome, and handling recurring bugs with wx and python expat versions clashing... also found some things like templates were missing and got those done too.

And now have a spiffy language switcher that looks quite nice (simple mode very easy, click More to get all the options...).

All will released on sourceforge as 1.1.3-build-9-2 once uploading is finished...

Now hopefully I can sort out my Inbox which is too big to fit onto a CD without compression ...

There is a new multilingual build of OOo 1.1.3 available on sourceforge At the moment, it is only available on Linux, Windows builds will be done on the weekend.

This build contains Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. All the languages will be installed. The translations are almost all up to date with latest translate cvs (Zulu has had a few additions) Note that this is the first public Tswana release!

Instructions:

• download the build
• untar
• cd into the folder
• ./setup-xx will run the setup program in language xx
• once it is installed, you can use the program ooswitchlang in the OpenOffice.org/program directory to switch the languages
• on linux, ooswitchlang requires Python and wxPython to be installed (note English isn't available in this build even though listed).
• we'll try simplify ooswitchlangs interface soon. On Windows it will be a standalone executable
• you have to quit openoffice and restart to switch languages

Only a multilingual build is available to persuade everyone to test that rather than single language builds, but these will be made available later. Everyone who wants to help test - please download and give feedback...

This is actually testing a number of things:

• compatibility of linux build with various platforms
• the latest translations
• the multilingual setup

Feedback on any of the above is helpful, esp the multilingual setup. the more detail the better!