In general this has more implications than simple singular/plural forms of units. Agreement/concord/congruence is the proper term. [1] In some language you will even change the form given the distance to the thing you are measuring or counting, even depending on the type of thing you are measuring or counting, or change on the gender of the thing, and then even only for some numbers.

Assume you have "1 meter", then you could write it out as "én meter" in Norwegian as "meter" is masculinum. Now assume you have "1 kilogram", then you would write it out as "ett kilogram" as "gram" is neutrum. Now assume "kilogram" is changed to the short form "kilo", then it is "én kilo" which is masculinum. The prefix "kilo" is only used for "kilogram", so it isn't valid Norwegian til say "én kilo" when referring to "1 km", or "én milli" when refering to "1 milligram".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_(linguistics)

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 7:26 AM, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:
On 28.07.2016 20:41, Stas Malyshev wrote:
Hi!

Good point. Could we not just have a monolingual text string property
that gives the preferred writing of the unit when used after a number? I
don't think the plural/singular issue is very problematic, since you
would have plural almost everywhere, even for "1.0 metres". So maybe we

We have code to deal with that - note that "1 reference" and "2
references" are displayed properly. It's a matter of applying that code
and having it provided with proper configs.

 You mean the MediaWiki message processing code? This would probably be powerful enough for units as well, but it works based on message strings that look a bit like MW template calls. Someone has to enter such strings for all units (and languages). This would be doable but the added power comes at the price of more difficult editing of such message strings instead of plain labels.

As far as I know, the message parsing is available through the MW API, so external consumers could take advantage of the same system if the message strings were part of the data (we would like to have grammatical units in SQID as well).


just need one alternative label for most languages? Or are there
languages with more complex grammar rules for units?

Oh yes :) Russian is one, but I'm sure there are others.


 Forgive my ignorance; I was not able to read the example you gave there.

Markus



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