spontaneous change in ui language to Greek, not resetable

[Lew_Rockwell_Fan]

The VLC ui changed from English to Greek for no apparent reason. Going through the menu motions by geometric cues so to speak (i.e, "and THAT dropdown menu THERE has to be the ui language selecter . . ." doesn't offer any choice that looks like English. Changing the selected language seems to make the display twitch a bit so I guess maybe it is changing language, but whatever it is it is still composed of Greek characters. I know a few Greek characters are used in lots of alphabets but I recognise more than half of what I see as Greek letters, so I assume it is Greek language. Using the command "vlc --language-en" as recommended elsewhere on this forum and lots of other places results in:

$ vlc --language=en
VLC media player 2.0.5 Twoflower (revision 2.0.5-0-g1661b7d)
vlc: unknown option or missing mandatory argument `--language=en'

I tried all the reasonable variations I could think of like 1 - instead of 2, lang instead of language, spaces around the =, etc.
I tried "vlc --help". It's quite long. I did vlc --help > vlc.txt so I could open it in a text editor an use search. I don't understand what went wrong there. The file wraps very strangely, with a whole lot of space off to the right and missing characters ("tream" instead of "stream" for example). Anyway I didn't find the answer there.

I've unistalled, purged, deleted the ~/vlc directory and reinstalled. This is under Lubuntu Precise, 64 bit with a Mate desktop.

I've looked in Synaptic under "local", "locale", and "language" and I can't find any trace of anything but English. Mate Control Center shows only english and english-us installed.

Where does vlc get its ui lnguage cue from? I presume the version in the Ubuntu repos isn't intended to default to Greek. I assume it is looking somewhere on the system and finds something that tells it a Greek ui is appropriate. Where can I find that something so I can kill it?

I've never been to Greece, I don't speak Greek, I never bought Greek hardware. My girlfriend won't . . . no, I don't need to go there, I never liked nostalgia movies, I never joined a fraternity, I don't fry foods. So where in the name of Zeus's fried catfish is this coming from?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC picks the language from the environment variables, as do most non-GNOME applications. This has nothing to do with your VLC or MATE settings. You can check the current values by running the command "locale" from your favorite command line terminal application. To change the settings, please refer to your distribution documentation; it depends.

[Lew_Rockwell_Fan]

Thank you.

Output of locale:

~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

So, are there other relevant variables not covered there? If nor, where does the Greek come from?

[Lew_Rockwell_Fan]

For that matter, here is locale -a:

~$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_CH.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX
zh_CN.utf8
zh_SG.utf8

In addition to a bunch of English varients I see some German and some Chinese installed. No Greek. In this context what the fsck is "C"? Could it be at fault?

[Lew_Rockwell_Fan]

Here is what it looks like, btw:



I didn't see any way to attach the png.

Just in case it this forum doesn't like tags, same image:

http://i41.tinypic.com/x60ryu.png

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

This is not greek. This is English with a Greek-looking font... Your Qt4 font configuration must be busted.

[Lew_Rockwell_Fan]

Thank you. That's interesting. I looked for something likely in Synaptic and installed qt4-qtconfig. Then I opened it. Guess what? That's right. A Greeklish UI. This gets me looking in closer to right places though. I suppose I could just check everything that comes up under "qt4" in Synaptic to be reinstalled. Or maybe reinstall ALL fonts. Anybody know what that font is SUPPOSED to be?