Re: [bug-gnu-libiconv] Missing transliteration to ascii of italian's accented vowels

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Pietro,

> I think iconv is great but misses proper transliteration to ascii of
> italian (and maybe other languages') accented vowels.
> It smartly translits "«" to "<<", and even "©" to "(C)", so I
> can't see why it shouldn't translit an "à" to an "a`" and so on ;)
> Maybe there's a reason, but I can't get it and I'm curious :)

The reason is that these transliterations would be language dependent.
For example, É is transliterated to E' for Italian but to E for French.
We decided to put the language dependent transliterations into glibc's
iconv(), but only language independent transliterations into libiconv -
because simplicity is more important for the latter.

> I list all the italian accented vowels below with the transliteration
> I think they very well could have: it's the transliteration still
> actually used on some mailing lists and usenet groups.
> The "*" identifies the accented vowels which are actually very used
> (the ones the italian keyboard layout has "on board", except "È", that
> is not "on board" but is very used nevertheless):
> 
> à a` *
> á a'
> è e` *
> é e' *
> ì i` *
> í i'
> ò o` *
> ó o'
> ù u` *
> ú u'
> 
> À A`
> Á A'
> È E` *
> É E'
> Ì I`
> Í I'
> Ò O`
> Ó O'
> Ù U`
> Ú U'

The glibc transliteration tables for Italian (see
localedata/locales/it_IT and localedata/locales/translit_combining)
only remove the accents, i.e. they currently don't do it like you propose.
You are welcome to submit a glibc bug report about it (at
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/ ).

Bruno