[freeciv-i18n] Re: Grammatical cases in translations.

[Gregory Berkolaiko <Gregory.Berkolaiko@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Christian Knoke wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 11:39:53PM +0200, Reinier Post wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 10:06:41PM +0100, Duarte Loreto wrote:
> > >    Hello!
> > > 
> > > Portuguese does not have this declination issue. So I have never payed 
> > > much 
> > > attention to the discussions around declination support. Anyway, below I 
> > > send you 2 links about a discussion on that had on the gnome-i18n list 
> > > with 
> > > some cross-posting with other lists.
> > > 
> > > To make it short, it seems that supporting declinations would require 
> > > changes to the ngettext module or something. This would not be very easy. 
> > > Please follow up the links. The discussion might have been taken to 
> > > another 
> > > more appropriate list, in which case that will be mentioned on one of the 
> > > posts.
> > 
> > Why not may English another target language, and mark up strings for case
> > in the source language (which would be "almost, but not quite English")?
> 
> Because the case of a noun differs between languages?

This must be the case.  In Indo-European languages cases might be 
compatible, but I suspect when you step out, it all breaks.  And you don't 
have to step very far, Finnish and Hungarian are examples.

The only way I could invent was to mark cases in already translated 
strings, like in

"%s1 give %s2 the map of the world"

and then have something like a table for each name, like

1, Romans
2, Romans

1, We
2, Us  /* This being the only example of cases in English I know of */

But all this is just curiosity on my part.  I believe that localisation is 
evil anyway.  Let's corrupt English instead!

G.