[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] spelling fixes (PR#1526)

[Jason Short <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanasis Kinias wrote:
> scripsit Daniel L Speyer:
>  
>
> > In the beginning there was Unix, and Unix spoke, and it said "Hello
> > world!".  It did not say "Hello United States of America" nor "Hello
> > English speakers."...
> >
> > Seriously, though, we should try to handle this generally enough to
> > support at least all the languages we're currently translated
> > to.  Hardcoding english's quirks seems like a very bad move.
>
> Maybe it should have been `Ave munde!' ;)
>
> On further reflection, Daniel is quite right.  I apologize for reflexive
> Anglocentrism ;)  But I do find it amusing that it was Connectiva to
> bring this up.
>
> Is there a `standard' way of coding i18n'd ordinals?  It's not a
> straightforward thing -- e.g. in Russian you need to know gender and
> case (1-ij for masc. sing. nom., 1-ogo for masc. sing. gen., etc.), in
> French you need to know gender and distinguish 1er from the others, etc.
You'd think the PL macro could be of some help:

  PL(num, "1st", "2nd")

but this (1) won't work for English without specific translation (there 
is no provision for "3rd"), and (2) forces explicit translation of each 
number (up to some arbitrary, undefined maximum).  It would work as a 
grosse hack (since all these translations would only have to be done 
once), but clearly is not a "good" solution.
I think the best immediate solution would be to apply the original patch 
- it is obviously correct for English, and although it is (presumably) 
not correct for other languages the original code isn't either.  But it 
should at least be legible in other languages.
jason