Re: Proposal for declinations in gettext

[martin v loewis de (Martin v. =?iso-8859-15?q?L=F6wis?=)]

Edward H Trager <ehtrager@umich.edu> writes:

> > 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"

The problem seems obvious to me: It is plain incorrect that "king" is
a separate msgid, if it is meant to be pasted in different
contexts. Instead, it should be added into any context where it is
meant to be pasted into, forming separate msgids.

Telling apart declinations might be insufficient, because some
languages may need changes to verbs, too, depending on whether it is
"king" or "queen" that is being "move"d.

Regards,
Martin