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(a)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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