jquery/globalize — Issue #92: Japanese abbreviated month formatting with the counter kanji
Author: poswald
Created: 2012-02-28 01:38:19+00:00
State: open

In Japanese, months are spoken as the month number with a counter 月 character (pronounced 'gatsu') following it. In the date formatting section there are 4 ways of printing the month:

M	Month of year (no leading zero)	9
MM Month of year (leading zero)	09
MMM Month name (abbreviated)	Sept
MMMM Month name (full)	September

Since Japanese only has 2 sections (number and counter) for each month's name there has to be some overlap. I expected this to map to:

M	Month of year (no leading zero)	９
MM	Month of year (leading zero)　	０９
MMM	Month name (abbreviated)	　　９月
MMMM Month name (full)　　　　	　　 ９月

The reasoning being that the `MMM` and `MMMM` formats are usually used in a language context and the other two are more often used for tables or for programmatic reasons. Note that `MM` looks strange in Japanese and probably wouldn't ever be used anyway. The problem is that `MMM` actually outputs just the ９ character without the counter kanji. The point of using `MMM` is usually to get text with a predictable length. As it stands now, using `MMM` gets readable output in english but in Japanese you get the same thing as `M` which you wouldn't use in the same context.

I would argue that the ９月 is already abbreviated and should just be passed out as is. Is there some sort of specification that this decision is based on? I've seen similar issues elsewhere so is this just based on a decision made in the past from some other library or specification?