Re: [Wikidata] Grammatical display of units

Hi! Right now, quantities with units are displayed by attaching unit name to the number. While it gives the idea of what is going on, it is somewhat ungrammatical in English (83 kilgoramm, 185 centimetre, etc.) [1] and in other languages - i.e. in Russian it's 83 килограмм, 185 сантиметр - instead of the correct "83 килограмма", "185 сантиметров". For some units, the norms are kind of tricky and fluid (e.g. see [2]), and they are not even identical across all units in the same language, but the common theme is that there are grammatical rules on how to do it and we're ignoring them right now. I think we do have some means to grammatically display numbers - for example, number of references is displayed correctly in English and Russian. As I understand, it is done by using certain formats in message strings, and these formats are supported in the code in Language classes. So, I wonder if we should maybe have an (optional) property that defines the same format for units? We could then reuse the same code to display units in proper grammatical way. Alternatively, we could use short units display [3] - i.e. cm instead of centimetre - and then plurals are not required. However, this relies on units having short names, and for some units short names can be rather obscure, and maybe in some language short names need grammatical forms too. Given that we do not link unit names, it would be rather confusing (btw, why don't we?). Some units may not have short forms at all. And the short names do not exactly match the languages - rather, they usually match the script (i.e. Cyrillic, or Latin, or Hebrew) - and we may not even have data on which language uses which script, in a useful form. So using short forms is very tricky. Any other ideas on this topic? Do we have a ticket tracking this somewhere? I looked but couldn't find it. [1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22082/are-units-in-english-singu… [2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0… [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528