If you can do what Bhutan do…
June 22, 2006 12:57 pm gnome, marketingAfter mentioning the interest of government in free software yesterday, it gave me great pleasure to see Bhutan adopting a Debian and GNOME distribution today.
Way to go Bhutan! Anyone here speak Bhutanese?
June 22nd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Well… Actually, I did work my way through George van Driem’s (Official Bhutanese Shining God of Languages) grammar of Bhutanese when I studied comparative linguistics with George. Bhutanese is properly called “Dzongkha” and is an interesting Tibetan language. There are also scores of other highly interesting languages spoken in Bhutan, but as far as I know, only Dzongkha is a written language.
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:21 pm
“Bhutanese is properly called “Dzongkha””
And thereby hangs an interesting tale. The People’s Republic of China believe that calling the language Dzongkha, which is what its speakers actually call it, is a bad thing. (I don’t quite follow why, but it has something to do with Chinese claims to the Tibetan cultural area, which includes Bhutan.) Under pressure from the PRC, Microsoft has removed the name “Dzhongkha” from all its software, so that it’s now called “Tibetan – Bhutan”. (This is about as sensible as calling Italian “Spanish – Italy”). I wonder whether this had any bearing on the Bhutanese government’s plan to scrap Microsoft and go with software which calls the language by its actual name.
( http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002619.html )
June 23rd, 2006 at 12:20 am
I shouldn’t wonder… King Jigme is independent-minded enough for that.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:42 am
The king is also abdigating in favour of democracy!
I have seen him speak on television, he is very humble and intelligent.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:43 am
that should be “abdicating” instead of ‘abdicating’ in the above comment.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:43 am
ok!