Re: Date Format with month names in genitive case - your opinions?

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>]

19.04.2017 16:19 David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com> wrote:
> In the Italian and French languages the nominative form is used in the full
> context date too.

I'm afraid we are running into misunderstanding here. If I used
the terms "genitive" and "nominative" I used them for simplicity
only. The fully correct terms should be "the form correct when
displaying the month name in the full date context" and "the form
correct when displaying the month name standalone". I'm aware
that the correct form in Italian and French and many other
languages is nominative and it will not be changed, no matter
if you use "%B" or "%OB".

An example of western European language where the genitive
form is required but not handled correctly is Catalan:

gener; febrer; març; abril - nominative forms when standalone, but:

20 de gener; 20 de febrer; 20 de març; 20 d’abril - there is currently
no simple solution to display "de" vs. "d’" and complex solutions
are not acceptable.

> In languages where the genitive form is used in full context, it is
> often written in nominative form (as an abbreviation)

I think I'm getting lost here: if a language requires a genitive
form but a software offers only nominative form then it's a bug
which I'm going to fix.

Whether abbreviations should have the nominative/genitive variants
is a separate question. But if you want to ask it then I'll answer:
for a long time I also thought they don't need them because
nominative/genitive cases are created by adding suffixes which
are removed when making an abbreviation. Until I've found examples
in Russian and Belarusian where the abbreviated nominative and
genitive forms do differ. See my slides for more details.
But abbreviations are the secondary problem. If you tell me how
to handle the full forms I will help myself with the abbreviations.

> and generally in these cases it can't be considered an error (it
> won't break the application) whereas, using the genitive form for
> the month name is certainly a bad thing (we can say that it'll
> break the application).
>
> So I agree with fios: I think that it is better to use the "O"
> modifier (%OB) for the genitive form (in the languages that uses
> it) while we should keep the %B for the nominative form.

OK. Again I don't agree here but I'm collecting opinions here and
trying to explain my point of view. It does not mean that other
people must agree with me and does not mean I will not change
my mind in the future. Although at this moment I am strongly
convinced to my opinion.

Best regards,

Rafal