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

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>]

(BTW, here is the date formatted incorrectly because the bug is
so common in Linux systems including web services:)

Dnia 20 kwiecień 2017 o 01:39 Piotr Drąg <piotrdrag gmail com> napisał(a):
> 2017-04-20 1:08 GMT+02:00 Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>:
> > 19.04.2017 16:19 David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com> wrote:
> > > 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.
>
> But am I correct to assume that with your solution, languages which
> don’t need different standalone and “format” forms would just always
> return the nominative (standalone) form? I.e. basically nothing
> changes for them?

Yes, definitely, always nominative. They may not even have a separate
genitive form.

More precisely: this depends on what they put in their locale database
[1] but if they don't need/don't want/don't have genitives they will
not put them there.

> For example, *with* your patches to glibc:
>
> Original string is “%B %d”, which in the en_US locale expands to “April 20”.
>
> Polish translation is “%d %B”, which correctly gives us “20
> kwietnia[genitive]“.

Exactly like that. Also compare:

"%OB %d" in en_US  → "April 20" (because there is no other form in English)
"%d %OB" in Polish → "20 kwiecień" (nominative - incorrect! but you get
what you wanted)

"%OB" is an alternative form, this means it's not intended to be
normally used except in special situations like when the month
name is displayed standalone. "%B" should automagically work
correctly in most cases.

> Translation to a hypothetical Western language that doesn’t employ
> genitive in this context is also “%d %B”, which correctly gives us “20
> aprilo[nominative]“.

You don't need a hypothetical language: that's how it will work in
English, French, Italian, German, and many more. :-)

> This is how every other platform works right now.

Yes, this means BSD [2] and OS X [3] where glib2 and other GNOME
libraries are intended to work correctly.

Best regards,

Rafal


[1] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=tree;f=localedata/locales;hb=HEAD
[2] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=strftime&sektion=3
[3]
https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man3/strftime.3.html