ubuntu-l10n-cy team mailing list archive

[Leandro Regueiro <leandro.regueiro@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Tony Pursell
<ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 18:52 +0200, Leandro Regueiro wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Leandro Regueiro
>> <leandro.regueiro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Tony Pursell
>> > <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> 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.
>>
>> Sorry for replying again. In
>> http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms#c I saw that
>> Welsh has 4 plural forms, and if I see well you only talked about two.
>>
>
> Ok. This is as a consequence of the Welsh system of 'mutations'. Some
> initial letters of nouns change in particular circumstances.
>
> For instance, after 2 ('dau' or 'dwy' - masculine/feminine) a 'soft'
> mutation occurs as follows:
>
> p > b
> t > d
> c > g
> b > f
> d > dd
> g is lost
> ll > l
> rh > r
> m > f
>
> resulting in different forms of the words beginning with these letters.
> Similar mutations happen for other numbers. After 'un' (one) soft
> mutation happens, but only for feminine nouns.
>
> Also, after numbers, Welsh always uses the singular form of the noun.
>
> But mutated nouns are still either 'singular' or 'plural'.
>
> Does that explain things for you.
>
> Tony

Thanks Tony and Christopher. This is very difficult to understand.

If I understood it well you have "singular" and "plural", but you also
have something called "mutations", that depending on the number of
"items" will cause one of four possible mutations that alter the
following word (or words). And after a number you always use
"singular". So when you put the equation "nplurals=4; plural= (n==1) ?
0 : (n==2) ? 1 : (n != 8 && n != 11) ? 2 : 3" in Gettext translation
files you put it only for mutations, and not for plural/singular like
the other languages do.

So given the following list:

0 dogs
1 dog
2 dogs
8 dogs
11 dogs
any other number dogs

you always use the singular form of "dogs" after the number, and if
there is another word after "dogs" you alter it using the "mutations",
and that is the only reason why you use the equation, isn't it?


My idea is to allow a system that for a given concept you can specify
several translations for language, and for several languages. For
example:

dog (english)
can (galician; masculine singular)
cadela (galician; feminine singular)
cans (galician; masculine plural)

so when you type the text, you select the language, the part of speech
(noun for example), and if it is applicable (you won't put "plural"
for a "verb", at least for galician language) automatically the system
reloads the list of possible plural forms and shows the following for
galician language (the same for english):

singular (n=1)
plural (n!=1)

for french will show:

singulier (n<2)
pluriel (n>1)

how would it be for welsh?