[Mediawiki-l] PLural Transformation for Upper Sorbian

[wiki at avenarius.sk]

On Friday, 4th August 2006 at 23:57:39 (GMT +0200), Michael Wolf wrote:

> I've already tested the solutions of other Slavic languages
> (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Croatian),
> but their requirements are some others. Upper Sorbian
> has following requirements:

>         Numeral         Form
>         1               Singular
>         2               Dual
>         3, 4            Nominative plural
>         0 and from 5    Genitive plural

> From the Slavic languages I tested, only Slovenian has still a dual. The
> tested solutions I modified don't work, they use the default form only.
> A differentiation doesn't happen.
> I hope you can help me.


Nope, I'm afraid you need to give up. Numerals of Slavic languages
simply are not taken into account in software such as MediaWiki or phpBB.
As far as I know, all Slavic languages follow this rule, that the word
"books" is different in "2, 3, 4 books" and "5, 6, 7 etc. books".

MediaWiki, phpBB, etc., only allows you to set one form of the noun
for "1 book", and another form for "2, 3, 4, 5, 6... books".

The result is that for all occurrences of "2, 3, 4 [some object]"
in MediaWiki, a false plural form (that for 5, 6, 7...) is displayed.

It would be very simple to fix this: just add one more string into
the language configuration file, for "2, 3, 4 objects".

Or, since you say Slovenian and Upper Sorbian even have extra forms
of plural nouns for the numeral 2, we would need 2 extra lines
in the language configuration files, in total 4 lines of code
for numerals:

1 object
2 objects
3, 4 objects
5, 6, 7 ..... objects

But trying to persuade the developers to add those two minuscule
lines of code might be a gargantuan task.  ;-)

-- 
Yours,
Alex.
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