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Re: gettext "plural forms" in Turkish


From: Sertaç Ö . Yıldız
Subject: Re: gettext "plural forms" in Turkish
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:10:35 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.17 (2007-11-01)

* Bruno Haible [26.Kas.07 14:42 +0100]:
> Sertaç Ö. Yıldız wrote:
[…]
> > >     “the apple”     → “elma”
> > >     “the apples”    → “elmalar” (!)
> 
> The ones without explicit numbers are different grammatical constructions;

Sure…

> therefore the relevant cases are:
> 
> > >     “0 apples”      → “0 elma”
> > >     “1 apple”       → “1 elma”
> > >     “2 apples”      → “2 elma”

Why? As far as we are concerned with the number of plural forms, both 
grammatical forms should count:

    msgid "the apple"
    msgid_plural "the apples"

> Therefore nplurals=1 is appropriate.

Quoting the relevant section¹ of the manual:
| Some languages only require one single form. There is no distinction 
| between the singular and plural form.

This is not the case for Turkish. And I fail to see the difference with 
Hungarian in this respect, which apparently² had similar issues till 
last year.

> Nilgün Belma Bugüner replied:
> > In practice, already, it's so (from gettext.tr.po): 
> >     "Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"
[…]
> A translator is free to choose a plural formula which fits better than
> the default one. It appears that for Turkish, the simple one
>     nplurals=1; plural=0;
> fits for the majority of the cases, whereas some messages better use
>     nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);
> if the translator wants to make the case n=1 look better.

But the documentation is confusing, if not misleading, for the cases 
that _require_ two plural forms.

¹ http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
² http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.utils.bugs/13750

-- 
~sertaç




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