Re: Proposal for declinations in gettext

[Andries Brouwer cwi nl]

    From: Edward H Trager <ehtrager@umich.edu>

    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)".

In some languages the form of a noun depends on whether the object is
"here" or "there". In other languages it depends on whether it is "mine"
or "yours" or "his". Etc. etc.

Trying to translate word-for-word and then constructing sentences
out of word translations is doomed.