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

[Jason Short <jshort@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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?

Sounds like a problem in the code, not in English.  For instance if we
didn't have ngettext (PL_()), we couldn't do different plurals in other
languages even if English had more plural forms.

jason