> How many languages share this concept of cross-tables of gender vs  
> gramatical number (singular/plural)? If it's a huge portion it might  
> actually make sense to include that just like pluralization is a  
> feature. If it's just a few (European) languages, it might rather go  
> into a plugin?

- all Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
Romanian, and regional languages/variations like Catalan, Corsican
etc.)
- German, Dutch, Swedish, not sure about other Scandinavian languages
- all Slavic languages that I know of (Russian, Polish, Czech, ...)
- all Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton, Gaelic, ...)

Yes these are all languages originating in Europe, but they make for
95% of the internet - and let's face it, few Rails websites will be
translated to Swahili or Aymará or Gujarati, so the only people NOT
surfing in these languages would be the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.
Genders OF COURSE have to be considered in laying out an i18n concept,
and so should cases. Are there any computational linguists on this
project besides me??

Some Asian languages, including Japanese, as well as many Native
American languages also have a concept of animatedness. I would
advocate re-using the gender field for this though.

If you don't want to have so many re-translations, you could look into
having Rails automatically adjust translations to match singular/
plural, gender and such. I had to do this when building the
translation system for http://www.cantr.net (a mass-multiplayer
society simulator written in PHP), because there are strings like "You
give ##OBJECT## to ##PERSON##" and there some 200+ types of objects
that could come up in this context. At first I thought of just storing
the object names with the correct article, but they also come up in
other contexts where there shouldn't be an article, plus it would have
been a problem with the Polish/Russian/Lithuanian case system.
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