On Tuesday 05 January 2010 21:24:13 harrym wrote: > I'm working a templatetag that determines whether to use 'a' or > 'an' in front of English words. My particular use case for this is > in a tumblelog app I'm developing - many different types of entry > may be added (link, html, quote, etc), and I'm linking to the 'Add > a[n] <type> entry' pages by iterating over the different types. > Would this be considered a useful addition to contrib.humanize?
Hmm, can it handle the following? an honest man a history book an historical book (debatable) My gut instinct is that it's not possible to work this out programmatically. When it comes to other languages, I imagine it's going to be even harder (if it's possible to get harder than 'impossible'), because you have things like gender and case to worry about, which certainly cannot be worked out by an algorithm. To give some examples, in French, the choice is between 'un' and 'une', depending on whether the word is masculine or feminine. In Greek, the choice is between ̔εις, ̔ενα, ̔ενος, ̔ενι, μια, μιαν, μιας, μια, ̔εν, ̔εν, ̔ενος, ̔ενι, depending on whether the word is masculine, feminine or neuter, and in nominative, accusative, genitive or dative case. Although in many cases you would probably omit the article altogether - the above words often mean "one" rather than "a". (That's NT Koine Greek, it might be different/simpler/more complicated in modern Greek). I imagine there are plenty of languages where this gets even worse, violating almost every assumption you don't even know you are making (like whether the article comes before or after or in the middle, or exists at all, etc. etc.) To summarise: if I were you, I would give up now. Luke -- "Mediocrity: It takes a lot less time, and most people don't realise until it's too late." (despair.com) Luke Plant || http://lukeplant.me.uk/
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