Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > and expect that the translator sends back the string

  >   "Il acheta %d beau%| cheval%|."

You are right that modification of the stem creates a complication.
However, in French it would not be difficult to handle.
The processing could recognize when the stem before %| calls for modification
and modify the plural according to the rules.

I think it would not be hard to implement operators french-masc and
french-fem that would handle all regular plurals.

       > - For the plural case, you need to know that the plural of "*eau" is
       >   "*eaux" in French (a rule that can be coded), but also that the
       >   plural of "cheval" is "chevaux" (or vice versa, that the singular
       >   of "chevaux" is "cheval") - which requires a dictionary lookup.

Each of these words has a regular plural.  french-masc would convert
al%| into aux when plural is called for.

For irregular plurals, the translator would give both forms by hand,
working at the gettext level.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)