Grrr, accidentally pressed ctrl-return to send...
I meant to say
I've just had an idea:
Why not use templates as the solution? Put the dialect-specific code in
the templates, and just put {{ }} around words that vary by dialect.
That can't be any worse than '' '' for italics, can it? That would
solve
probably 90% of the cases.
Thus, for our example sentence, we would have something like
The {{colour}}s of the U.S. flag are red, white, and blue.
And the colour template would have the dialect-specific code like
-{en-us color; en-gb colour}-
Similarly, {{zucchini}} could be
{-en-au Zucchini en-nz Courgette en-us Zucchini en-gb Courgette en-ca
Zucchini-}
Of course, then we would have to agree on what to call the templates,
but that seems like a much easier problem to deal with. At the very
least, {{color}} could just include the {{colour}} template, or vice-versa.
- David