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

[David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com>]

I didn't consider the fact that there are very few applications where the standalone month name is used (e.g. calendars). Considering that, the problem of "breaking" some applications, that was my main concern about your proposal, could be solved without too many effort.

-------- Original Message --------

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

Local Time: April 20, 2017 1:08 AM

UTC Time: April 19, 2017 11:08 PM

From: digitalfreak lingonborough com

To: David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com>, gnome-i18n gnome org

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.

Here I completely got your point.

I mentioned Italian and French only because these are the two language I speak. By the way another language that needs the genitive form is Spanish (Castilian): "20 de enero", "20 de febrero", "20 de marzo", ...

> 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.

I must admit that initially I didn't see your slides. They made me change my mind about your proposal. I was quite convinced that the use of the nominative form in languages that require the genitive form could be considered as an abbreviation and certainly not as an error, and for this reason I thought that it wasn't worth doing this change.

> 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

In conclusion, considering the very small size of the problems that this change will cause and the benefit that it will provide for the grammar side, I think you convinced me.

Dear regards,

David