Pluralization rules around the world
developer.mozilla.org
developer.mozilla.org
At this point you need to understand a big of Russian grammar. As mentioned in the link, Russian has different forms for -ending-in-1 numbers, -ending-in-2-through-4 numbers, and -ending-in-5-through-9 numbers. Also, the third set of plurals are often irregular.
This being a Soviet factory, the requisition for fireplace pokers needs to be sent with all the correct paperwork to the bureaucracy. A debate arises: What is the appropriate plural for kocherga? Send the form out with the wrong word, and the wrath of the Soviet bureaucracy will fall upon them.
After arguing back and forth for a while, an old janitor hears the conversation and proposes a solution: Send in a requisition asking for three kochergi and two more kochergi. A few months later, they get their fireplace pokers along with a note: "Here are the four kochergi and one more kocherga which you requested."
The bureaucrats didn't know what the correct plural form was either, so their reply is similarly odd.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%8...
So kočergá, kočergí, kočerjóg.
English declension is so simple we don't include this information in a typical dictionary entry. ("Poker, pokers, poker's, pokers'")
1 kocherga = одна кочерга
2,3,4 kochergas = две,три,четыре кочерги
5 kochergas = пять кочерёг?
5 kochergas = пять кочерг?
5 kochergas = пять кочерыг?
5 kochergas = пять кочерег?
Something like "You requested 3 kochergi and 2 more kochergi. Here they are."
Yes, that indicates that management processed two requests as one. If they would answer 2+3 that would mean they have not noticed what is going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word
The counters often apply to classes of things, like "small animals", "long, thin items", "liquids", "flat items", "sitting occasions", etc. For example, i would guess pokers would use 本, 'pon'.
Every noun uses one of the counters, there are lots of them, they all carry a shade of meaning, and some of them are pretty obscure. Hence, there is also humour around them. I remember a Japanese-speaking friend explaining how she'd told someone that she had seen three rabbits on the road, but rather than using the normal counter for small animals, she used the one for flat things, because they were roadkill.
But I think the Brazilian Portuguese rule in this chart for the cardinal 0 is wrong: I think it should be "other" (0 pontos) rather than "one" (0 ponto), just as in Spanish, English, and European Portuguese.
I've sent a note to a native speaker to check my intuition.
Version control shows Firefox has used form #15 for Macedonian at least since 2012: https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/mk/annotate/d13b2b460aeb...
One of the impressive things they've managed to do is make the multiplayer scale quite nicely--how many other games can say they have 400 concurrent players on one map and still be playable?
It's also quite[0] addictive. You may find you burn a lot of hours.
Exceptional value for money if it's your sort of thing.
[0] The Cracktorio nickname is well deserved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJrY3p9nzVY
1. Well, the original file was copied around the Internet well before YouTube, but that is the original video re-encoded in higher resolution and uploaded to YouTube.
Further reading: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/holiday-light-show-videos
Also, it’s a bit naïve to say that a declined language only has 1-2 forms without taking into account oblique cases, but that’s a hard thing to deal with programmatically.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale-Maketext/lib/Locale/Maket...
I can't complain, but what an odd name for that "family"!
(...which is not actually a family, by the way.)
For example, in full phrases like "Clear history after N days", "Found N files" some languages would change the part before the number (instead or together).
Another example is text+button "N items in your cart [Buy them now]". The text may be unaffected by the number at all, but in the button "them" usually has to become "it" when N is 1.
I don't think the article is accurate. Turkish definitely shouldn't be together with Chinese, it needs plural forms in some situations in which Chinese doesn't, I know this because our product was localized for both. Unicode CLDR is recommended reference.
Hungarian has plural forms. kutya = dog, kutyák = dogs. They follow the same pattern as english.
The plurals are used way less often, as [roughly] the language doesn't pluralise when it's redundant. But that's outside the scope of PluralForm., and it's up to its users to avoid `PluralForm.get`ting phrases which already tell you the quantity.
[That said, the Chinese example should probably be reworded. The stated reason applies to Hungarian, but it's not the whole reason they're in #0.]
You mean one should not use `PluralForm.get` to generate snippets of the form "0 pages", "1 page", "2 pages"? Because if that's what you mean, you are directly contradicting all of the examples on the page.
That said, my wording did needlessly assume one of two approaches. The 'downloads' example shows both.
PluralForm is often called at the whole-phrase level, for all languages, rather than as at an 'atomic' level, at the points where specific languages pluralise things. This contrast is shown in the 'downloads' example.
In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice, if the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.
This pops up in English too. For instance, chrome://browser/locale/downloads/downloads.properties contains:
shortHours=h;h
shortMinutes=m;m
shortSeconds=s;s
And a multiplayer game might need
ready=Are You Ready?;Are You Ready?
As most languages have a singular 'you'.
... which are all cases where Hungarian doesn't use the plural, which is why Hungarian shouldn't be in the same group as English.
> In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice, if the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.
... except if the plural form always matches the singular one, in which case the correct approach is to write the thing once. Category #0.
Thanks for your efforts, but you have clarified nothing with regards to Hungarian.
Well, except the "are you ready" example. That is indeed one case where it might make sense to use different Hungarian forms.
Hungarian has plural forms which are distinct from the singular. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase
Otherwise, yeah, they'd be in group 0.
1, ends in 1 except 11, 111...: -st
2, ends in 2 except 12, 112...: -nd
3, ends in 3 except 13, 113...: -rd
everything else: -th
(also 0, most people say zeroth but nobody really feels comfortable with it.)
However they came to be, there's no mental load in applying them and nobody who speaks English natively ever much thinks about it.
Come from country who use Type 0 (i.e. no plural whatsoever), English is already complicated and make no sense at first.
On top of this base strata are some more choices. You have some choices to make for 0 (English says that 0 gets a plural form, French believes it to be singular). You can also choose how the rules differ when you get to systematic naming for large numbers--do you lump it in with many, or do you reuse the rules for the small numbers when they show up in larger numbers? Note that systematic naming doesn't have to be based on base-10 (say, Danish), nor does the start of systematic names need to happen on a clean boundary (English starts it at 13, for example).
It'd be hard to make a case for regular number words starting at thirteen. 13, 14, and 15 are all exceptional in that the numbers 3/4/5 are not usually pronounced "thirt", "fort", or "fiff". You could make a case for starting at 16, but even then it isn't normal for the lower place value to precede the higher one. At 21 you see words that are formed in a fully regular way, but the roots for 20, 30, and 50 are still odd, now being "twen", "thir", and "fiff".
From 60 on you can construct number names just by knowing the numbers 1-50 and the place values (hundred / thousand / million / etc.).
In order to call the ordinals perfectly systematic, you need to take the irregular cardinals as a given. If you're having trouble there, you'll have trouble with the ordinals too.