LANGUAGE question

[jwb@example.com (Jim Breen)]

A question about setting the (GNU) LANGUAGE environment variable. 

The docs say:

glibc> the `LANGUAGE' variable's value can
glibc> consist of a colon separated list of locale names.  The attentive
glibc> reader will realize that this is the way we manage to implement one of
glibc> our additional demands above: we want to be able to specify an ordered
glibc> list of language.

I have been experimenting with LANGUAGE set to "en_US:ja_JP", which I
interpreted to mean: "give me English if you can, but if not, give me 
Japanese". I expected at first to see no results form this. I planned 
to change it to "ja_JP:en_US" and repeat the test.

Well, with the "en_US:ja_JP" setting.

(a) `more' now talks to me in Japanese - it says $BB3$1$k(B at the prompt,
`more -h' responds "$B;H$$J}(B: more [-dfln] [+$B9THV9f(B | +/$B%Q%?!<%s(B] $BL>A0(B1 $BL>A0(B2",
etc.

In fact, every app that appeared in /usr/share/locale/ja/LC_MESSAGES
started speaking Japanese.

(b) yudit whipped all its menus, etc. into Japanese.

Setting LANGUAGE to "ja_JP:en_US" made no difference; they still all
spoke Japanese.

I repeated the experiment with en_US:fr_FR and fr_FR:en_US. The same
outcome - the apps all stayed in French.

Is the above behaviour correct response to that LANGUAGE setting? Seems
to me an odd way of having an "ordered list of language(s)". More of an
"anything_but_English" policy.

Jim
-- 
Jim Breen  [jwb@example.com  http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/]
Visiting Professor, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of 
Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
+81 3 5974 3880         [$B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$BEl5~30Bg(B]