Documenting a preference for US English?

Documenting a preference for US English?

[Phil Sainty]

On 2017-10-13 01:04, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Thanks, this is fine with me, but please in the future use the US
> English spelling of words such as "behavior".

Sure, I'll attempt to keep this in mind in future.

I spotted that I had both spellings of that word (I'd copied the US
spelling from your suggestion, but typed the UK spelling elsewhere),
and I then spent some time trying to establish whether US spelling
was preferred, but (a) I didn't find anything in the documentation,
and (b) I found other pre-existing instances of UK English elsewhere,
so I ended up changing them to the UK spelling for internal consistency
with the rest of the documentation I'd written (on the assumption that
there may have been other such words as well -- UK spelling is never
going to jump out at me as wrong, so I won't necessarily realise if a
given word has a different spelling in US English in the first place).

I've also now found the following discussion from 2008 regarding the
existing instances of UK English:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-06/msg01848.html

Is there such a recommendation in the documentation that I missed,
though?  If not, it sounds like it would be a good thing to add
somewhere.

I had grepped for "english" and then for "american" and "US" within
those results, and didn't turn up any instructions to this end.

There is, however, the following example in lisp/textmodes/ispell.el:

;; Local Variables:
;; mode: emacs-lisp
;; comment-column: 40
;; ispell-check-comments: exclusive
;; ispell-local-dictionary: "american"
;; End:

Perhaps the Emacs repository's .dir-locals.el entry for emacs-lisp-mode
ought to include these ispell variables?


-Phil

Re: Documenting a preference for US English?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2017-10-12, at 23:24, Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz> wrote:

> I've also now found the following discussion from 2008 regarding the
> existing instances of UK English:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-06/msg01848.html

How about this?

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-06/msg00451.html

;-)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski

Re: Documenting a preference for US English?

[Paul Eggert]

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Phil Sainty wrote:
> I had grepped for "english" and then for "american" and "US" within
> those results, and didn't turn up any instructions to this end.

$ grep -ri 'american spell' $(git ls-files)
ChangeLog.2:	Rename using American spelling.  Update all uses.
doc/lispref/ChangeLog.1:	Prefer typical American spelling for "acknowledgment".
doc/misc/ChangeLog.1:	Prefer typical American spelling for "acknowledgment".
lisp/ChangeLog.16:	Prefer typical American spelling for "acknowledgment".
lisp/ChangeLog.16:	Emacs uses American spelling.
lisp/gnus/ChangeLog.3:	Use American spelling for 'normalize'

> Is there such a recommendation in the documentation that I missed,
> though?  If not, it sounds like it would be a good thing to add
> somewhere.

Sure, why not? I installed the attached.

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From 53e95d01fd8865204fdedcf30f4629d1d0634129 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 22:38:28 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] * CONTRIBUTE: Suggest American English.

---
 CONTRIBUTE | 3 ++-
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTE b/CONTRIBUTE
index d01ac8b..78a2d51 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTE
+++ b/CONTRIBUTE
@@ -195,7 +195,8 @@ them right the first time, so here are guidelines for formatting them:
   sentences starting with a capital and ending with a period (except
   the summary line should not end in a period).  See
   https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Comments.html
-  or run 'info "(standards)Comments"'.
+  or run 'info "(standards)Comments"'.  American English is preferred
+  in Emacs.
 
   They are preserved indefinitely, and have a reasonable chance of
   being read in the future, so it's better that they have good
-- 
2.7.4

Re: Documenting a preference for US English?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

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() Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>
() Fri, 13 Oct 2017 10:24:17 +1300

   Is there such a recommendation in the documentation that I
   missed, though?  If not, it sounds like it would be a good
   thing to add somewhere.

Not in the proper docs, but an anchor for them (eventually):

 http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=78479a398

Thanks for prompting.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen -----------------------------------------------
 (defun responsep (query)
   (pcase (context query)
     (`(technical ,ml) (correctp ml))
     ...))                              748E A0E8 1CB8 A748 9BFA
--------------------------------------- 6CE4 6703 2224 4C80 7502


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Re: Documenting a preference for US English?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 10:24:17 +1300
> From: Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> There is, however, the following example in lisp/textmodes/ispell.el:
> 
> ;; Local Variables:
> ;; mode: emacs-lisp
> ;; comment-column: 40
> ;; ispell-check-comments: exclusive
> ;; ispell-local-dictionary: "american"
> ;; End:
> 
> Perhaps the Emacs repository's .dir-locals.el entry for emacs-lisp-mode
> ought to include these ispell variables?

That could be problematic, since we have in the repository a small
amount of documents that are not written in US English (nor in English
in general).  For example, the tutorials.