Re: Date Format with month names in genitive case - your opinions?

[Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com>]

20.04.2017 23:01 David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com> wrote:
>  I didn't consider the fact that there are very few applications where the
> standalone month name is used (e.g. calendars). Considering that, the problem
> of "breaking" some applications, that was my main concern about your proposal,
> could be solved without too many effort.

This is what I was going to tell. To be honest, I should make
a huge survey before telling that there are only few applications
which display month names standalone and most of the applications
which display dates display at least the day number and the month
name together. I think that you as the translators have a bigger
experience as you have translated many or all such applications.
How many times did you translate "%d %B" or "%d %B %Y" vs.
"%B" or "%B %Y"?

Also the potential "breaking" is not greater than the current 
situation when all date formats are "broken". And, another good
news, the difference will be visible in "only" about 20 languages
(compared to about 200 languages currently supported by Linux).

>   
>
> >      -------- Original Message --------
> >      Subject: Re: Date Format with month names in genitive case - your
> > opinions?
> >      Local Time: April 20, 2017 1:08 AM
> >      UTC Time: April 19, 2017 11:08 PM
> >      From: digitalfreak lingonborough com
> >      To: David Sapienza <david sapienza protonmail com>,
> > gnome-i18n gnome org
> >       
> >       [...]
> >      An example of western European language where the genitive
> >      form is required but not handled correctly is Catalan:
> >       
> >      gener; febrer; març; abril - nominative forms when standalone, but:
> >       
> >      20 de gener; 20 de febrer; 20 de març; 20 d’abril - there is currently
> >      no simple solution to display "de" vs. "d’" and complex solutions
> >      are not acceptable.
>  Here I completely got your point.
>  I mentioned Italian and French only because these are the two language I
> speak.

Are you able to understand Latin? It is not supported by any operating
system I'm aware of but AFAIK it is close to Italian and it features
the same complex declension system as many eastern European languages.
I hope it will let you understand my idea even better.

> By the way another language that needs the genitive form is Spanish
> (Castilian): "20 de enero", "20 de febrero", "20 de marzo", ...

Fortunately, no. I've consulted it with Spanish speaking people
and since the preposition is always "de" it's sufficient for them
to use "%d de %B" - problem solved. Even in your example:
"20 de enero" is correct, "20 d’enero" would be incorrect.
But of course if they decide to use this standalone/full-date
(or basic/alternative or nominative/genitive) system they will
be able to do it.

>   
>
>      > >       
> >      > In languages where the genitive form is used in full context, it is
> >      > often written in nominative form (as an abbreviation)
> >       
> >      I think I'm getting lost here: if a language requires a genitive
> >      form but a software offers only nominative form then it's a bug
> >      which I'm going to fix.
> >       
> >      Whether abbreviations should have the nominative/genitive variants
> >      is a separate question. But if you want to ask it then I'll answer:
> >      for a long time I also thought they don't need them because
> >      nominative/genitive cases are created by adding suffixes which
> >      are removed when making an abbreviation. Until I've found examples
> >      in Russian and Belarusian where the abbreviated nominative and
> >      genitive forms do differ. See my slides for more details.
> >      But abbreviations are the secondary problem. If you tell me how
> >      to handle the full forms I will help myself with the abbreviations.
> >
> >  >   
>  I must admit that initially I didn't see your slides. They made me change my
> mind about your proposal.

If these slides are so "powerful" then let me put the link again for
those who have started reading only here:
https://rluzynski.fedorapeople.org/slides/2017-01-27-DevConf.cz/GenitiveMonths-updated.pdf

> I was quite convinced that the use of the nominative form in languages that
> require the genitive form could be considered as an abbreviation and certainly
> not as an error, and for this reason I thought that it wasn't worth doing this
> change.

No, this is an error caused by a software bug. Sometimes ignored,
sometimes neglected, sometimes people say "ah, that's just a computer,
let's enjoy that it can display our letters and it is localized
at all", but sometimes makes people upset.

>   
> [...]
>  In conclusion, considering the very small size of the problems that this
> change will cause and the benefit that it will provide for the grammar side, I
> think you convinced me.
>   
>  Dear regards,
>   
>  David

Thank you for your feedback.

Best regards,

Rafal