Re: l10n architecture proposal available for comments

Axel Hecht <[email protected]> wrote:
> Rimas Kudelis wrote:
>> Do you intend to support Grammatical cases [1] in any way? If yes,
>> then how do you see it?..
>
> Yes, it works pretty much like the gender example in
> http://people.mozilla.com/~axel/l20n/js-l20n/sample-01.html.

The example seems to show how to change the surrounding sentence to 
match the gender of a replacement word. The replacement determines the 
gender, and the sentence has to adapt.

Case works the other way round: the structure of the sentence determines 
the case a replacement word must take, and the spelling of the word 
changes depending on case it needs to take to fit into a given sentence.

Often both grammatical categories (three actually - there's also number) 
work together and require changing both the sentence and replacement 
word for everything to agree.

Consider also this situation in Russian:

1 file = 1 ÆÁÊÌ
4 files = 4 ÆÁÊÌÁ
5 files = 5 ÆÁÊÌÏ×
21 file = 21 ÆÁÊÌ

The word "ÆÁÊÌ" (file) is in nominative singular in the first line, 
genitive singular in the second line (yes, singular, even though there 
are four of them), genitive plural in the third line, and nominative 
singular again in the last line.

Igor Tandetnik