Re: Plural forms in Czech

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 02:44:09PM +0200, Petr Kadlec wrote:
> the plural type to be used for Czech (cs):
...
> Almost any today speaker would use the following rule:
> plural=(n==1) ? 0 : (n>=2 && n<=4) ? 1 : 2;
> (Which is identical to Slovak.)
...
> http://www.ujc.cas.cz/poradna/odpo.html#dveste

I'm a native Czech speaker and would like to confirm this request.

The above link points to a grammar consultiong sevice of The Czech
Language Institute (part of The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Rep.).
The referenced text says that the older (more complicated formula) was
codified until 1970's and is no longer preferred.

I beleive that the formula should be changed as suggested.
I beleive there are many people who would complain that the old formula
is unnatural. (I beleive that gettext could try to educate people and
should not use collowuial language, but it's truly not wise with this
point.)
Bruno, please put the URL there, so you get less complaints.  ;-)

-----
And now for something completely different:
In Czech, we separate hours and minutes by a dot---noon is "12.00 hodin".
Colon is used only for separating minutes and seconds: the expression
"1:40,5 min." means 100.5 seconds (comma is std. Czech decimal dot).

The situation is a bit complicated, as 12:01:30 is tolerated, though
12.01:30 is also possible.  But "12:00" for noon is not Czech.
But people are so much accustomed to poor localization and
English-speaking digital clocks, that they even seem to require "12:00"
sometimes. But the printed time-tables still use the 12.00 form.

My source is http://www.typo.cz/_typo/typo-pravidla-hladka.html
which is server about Czech typography (in Czech only).

Bruno, are you willing to change ":" to "." as the Czech hours-minute
separator?  (With my email in a comment next to it, of course.)

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal