Re: Proposal for declinations in gettext

[Edward H Trager <ehtrager umich edu>]

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Danilo Segan wrote:

> The good side of this approach (the syntactic elements are arbitrary,
> don't comment on those) is that programs that use gettext for l10n would
> need no change: everything would be done on the gettext library side and
> by translators (it's even better than plural-forms in that manner). Of
> course, care should be taken to allow also combination of these and
> plural forms, as in:

> msgid "king"
> msgid_plural "kings"
> msgstr[0]<0> "kralj"
> msgstr[0]<5> "kraljem"
> msgstr[2]<0> "kraljevi"
> msgstr[2]<5> "kraljevima"
>

Why not just use another index for plural forms instead of "msgid_plural"?

While in many languages the pronounciation (and thus the spelling) differs
only between "singular"  and "plural", there *ARE* also languages that
distinguish *MORE* forms, such as "singular", "two of an item", "plural
(being three or more of an item)".  I believe the maximum in a
known/studied human language is to distinguish *FIVE* different forms.
Unfortunately, I would have to research what language(s) are like that,
since I no longer remember.

(As a tangential point of linguistic interest, a somewhat opposite sort of
phenomenon also occurs:  Whereas most human cultures have numbers for
counting up to 10, there are some cultures that have *FEWER* number words.
For example, the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon have words only for "one",
"two", and "many" in their language (see Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Last Days
of Eden, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1992) )

>
> Before diving into gettext code, it'd be nice to hear if this kind of
> approach would work for any language other than Serbian (I repeat, I
> find it likely to work for Slavic languages, and German, those being the
> languages I'm at least a bit familiar with).
>
> In any case, looking forward to hearing from all of you.
>
>
> Again, sorry for crossposting, but I just wanted to reach the widest
> possible audience, so as to get some *real* insight into the problem.
>
> Cheers,
> Danilo
>
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