On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Danilo Segan wrote:
> The good side of this approach (the syntactic elements are arbitrary, > don't comment on those) is that programs that use gettext for l10n would > need no change: everything would be done on the gettext library side and > by translators (it's even better than plural-forms in that manner). Of > course, care should be taken to allow also combination of these and > plural forms, as in: > msgid "king" > msgid_plural "kings" > msgstr[0]<0> "kralj" > msgstr[0]<5> "kraljem" > msgstr[2]<0> "kraljevi" > msgstr[2]<5> "kraljevima" > Why not just use another index for plural forms instead of "msgid_plural"? While in many languages the pronounciation (and thus the spelling) differs only between "singular" and "plural", there *ARE* also languages that distinguish *MORE* forms, such as "singular", "two of an item", "plural (being three or more of an item)". I believe the maximum in a known/studied human language is to distinguish *FIVE* different forms. Unfortunately, I would have to research what language(s) are like that, since I no longer remember. (As a tangential point of linguistic interest, a somewhat opposite sort of phenomenon also occurs: Whereas most human cultures have numbers for counting up to 10, there are some cultures that have *FEWER* number words. For example, the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon have words only for "one", "two", and "many" in their language (see Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1992) ) > > Before diving into gettext code, it'd be nice to hear if this kind of > approach would work for any language other than Serbian (I repeat, I > find it likely to work for Slavic languages, and German, those being the > languages I'm at least a bit familiar with). > > In any case, looking forward to hearing from all of you. > > > Again, sorry for crossposting, but I just wanted to reach the widest > possible audience, so as to get some *real* insight into the problem. > > Cheers, > Danilo > > -- > Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ > > -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
