In Hebrew, it's not so straight-forward. Firstly, you don't say "3
new
messages", you say "3 messages new". We don't have a way to tell
Callweaver to play files in a certain order based on the language.
But it gets worse than this. Hebrew has singular and plural verbs and
adjectives as well as nouns, so the word "new" that is used for "1 new
message" is not the same "new" as is used for "3 new messages".
This is mostly because English is rather simplified in these matters.
Most other germanic languages use different forms for different
numbers. In norwegian "You have one new message" will be "Du har [en
ny] melding" whereas "You have two new messages" will be "you have to
nye meldinger". Now, I don't know any non-germanic languages, bu
And the final bit of confusion comes in when we find out that the word
order is different yet again for singular. So whereas in English
we say
"<N> new message(s)", in Hebrew we say "message new 1" and "2 messages
news".
There's works in progress to clean up the language support, as Steve
Underwood has pointed out. Word order differs between most languages,
and is sometimes free of choice to the writer, so this must be
written to support each language separately
On this last point, I think that time measures like minutes and
seconds
have the same problem, but I'm not 100% sure about that (I'm still
very
much learning the language, having been in Israel only 5 months).
Oh and it occurs to me that you don't say "You have no new
messages", you
say "You don't have new messages".
One other potential gotcha is that Hebrew is a gendered language.
So if
you compare the phrases "3 new messages" and "3 new books", both
"3" and
"new" would be different in the second phrase because "book" is male
whereas "message" is female. In our initial run through this
translation
process, we don't think we've hit this particular problem yet, as
it would
appear that the only thing we describe in the voicemail application is
messages, and numbers in isolation are female as well as when used to
describe a quantity of messages. Extensions are female too, luckily.
Same thing in most germanic languages, well, apart from English.
A friend of mine and I were talking the other week and he told me
then that
this issue had come up in some weekly get-together the Asterisk folks
apparently have. Apparently this was given as the reason why the
Voicemail
application couldn't be internationalised. It struck me then as it
does
now that the only real way to solve this is to have some way of
specifying
the grammar where this is needed, based on the values of certain
variables,
probably using some kind of basic scripting. Dealing with gender
may be
difficult, but I'm sure it could be solvable (maybe it could be
possible to
assign genders to things like extensions, messages, etc).
Anyway, something for you smart people to scratch your heads
over. I hope
to have the Hebrew files available soon to commit somewhere, but of
course
the voicemail application will be grammatically incorrect in some
places
until this issue is resolved.
IMHO we should stanardise the derivatives of say.c to both abstrihize
this where possible and also add specific language support. Stuff
like numbers and gender should be part of the structure. This won't
hurt much since English don't use numbers for adjectives (one new,
two new etc) whereas many other languages have two numbers
(norwegian: en ny, to nye) and others may even have several numbers -
specific word for 'two' or for 'some' or for 'many' (IIRC polish has
three numbers: one, some, many). If anyone here in here is
knowledgable in linguistics, this could perhaps be good :)
roy
---
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tlf: 98013356
---
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They
never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our
people, and neither do we.” - George W. Bush
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