Talk:International System of Units/Archives/02/2017

Country-specific adaptations of SI

Is it worth mentioning that not only China and Japan are using local language to spell SI unit names and SI symbols? I know for sure about Russia: there is a Standard GOST 8.417-2002 which echoes SI, but allows Cyrillic spelling. And it is those local names and symbols that are actually used in all scientific publications, household appliances, road maps etc. Igusarov (talk) 06:46, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand how there can be local symbols in the SI. If they are not internationally agreed symbols they are outside the SI. The names are different. I don't see any harm in explaining that each language uses its own name and spelling, explaining initially the differences in different varieties of English (because this is the English Wikipedia) and then in French (because French is the primary language of the SI). I'm not sure how far one would want to go after that, other than point out that in general each language is different. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 10:58, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry for unclear wording which may have mislead you... Of course, using native language to denote SI units is perfectly natural and expected. My concern is the spelling of SI symbols. I suppose I got the wrong idea that Chinese use glyph-based prefixes when writing unit symbols.

By saying "local symbols" I actually had in mind "symbols of SI units spelled in local alphabet, as if the symbols were abbreviation of native name for the corresponding SI unit". To draw you a picture, imagine visiting a car dealership and asking for technical parameters of some car. In Russia you'd be given a datasheet where car length is in meters (or millimeters), engine torque is in newton-meters, engine power is in kilowatts. Looks like SI units, right? But symbols used for these values are "мм" for mm, "Н*м" for N*m and "кВт" for kW. Same base units, same definitions, same scale of decimal prefixes, same pronunciation (well, as far as it is possible given slightly different phonetic capabilities). The only difference is using native alphabet to spell SI symbols.

I find such practice somewhat inconsistent with many other countries (for example, in Portuguese they say "quilometro" but the symbol is still "km"), and wondered whether such specific adaptation of spelling is worth mentioning here. Igusarov (talk) 09:30, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

I guess it is relevant to the section describing the extent to which the SI has been adopted in different countries. What do others think? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 15:00, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Should International System of Units#Printing SI symbols be added to or should something else be done? As for Japan, they use local language to write almost everything (in that it's usually written in local script); in the case of most metric units, it's usually as a transliteration of the unit's name. The thing is that this is a very ordinary thing. There are a couple of things to mention, though; some are already mentioned in the section I mentioned & others are elsewhere mentioned; so ... anyway ... if we have some worthwhile stuff to mention, we'll be sure to. Jimp 15:08, 8 February 2017 (UTC)