ubuntu-l10n-cy team mailing list archive

[Tony Pursell <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 16:20 +0200, Leandro Regueiro wrote:
> Hi,
> I am trying to design and build a terminology discussion system, and I
> have some doubts about the plural forms. I am used to languages like
> english, spanish or galician that have two plural forms that we call
> "singular" and "plural", but since I plan to create a system able to
> handle all languages I need some information about weird plural forms
> (at least for me) like the Polish, Irish, Welsh, Russian, Serbian or
> the Arabic ones, for mention some of them. Do you have a specific name
> for every one of your language plural forms? Can you list that names?
> 
> I also have doubts about the part of speech names. As I said above I
> am used to certain languages where we have verbs, substantives,
> adjectives, etc. Maybe the languages I chose are not the best ones,
> and perhaps I should ask for languages from India, southwestern Asia
> or Africa, but can you provide me a list of parts of speech for your
> languages as well?
> 
> 
> A lot of thanks,
>                           Leandro Regueiro
> 

Hi Leandro

Welsh has singular (unigol) and plural (lluosog) forms of nouns.  

The main problem with Welsh is that there are no 'regular' plurals (like
the way adding an 's' forms the majority of plurals in English).  There
are a number of ways plurals are formed but no easy rules to determine
which applies to a particular noun (e.g adding 'au' or 'od') and no
special terminology to describe the rules.

Like many languages there are collective nouns, plural nouns and
dual/double nouns, but these are, to me, just semantic distinctions as
they generally all have singular forms.  For instance, 'dwylaw' (hands -
literally 'two hands') can be called a dual noun, or just be seen as the
irregular plural of 'llaw' (hand). 

Other parts of speech in Welsh are much the same as the languages you
are familiar with. Welsh does have its own grammatical constructs which
are not found in those languages (to my knowledge) but without knowing
more about the requirements of your 'terminology discussion system' I
would not know if discussion of them is relevant.

Tony