New blog post: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Language" http://garbled.benhamill.com/2017/04/18/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-language/
More than happy to talk about this on here with folks, too, if they want.
@benhamill Numerals are fun to translate. English only has the one singular, one plural and one rare "double" forms. Other languages have more. Polish has different plurals depending on the number itself. Japanese has different numerals depending on the shape of the things being counted, etc.
@deshipu Fascinating. You got any reference links that might include examples?
@benhamill Well, I'm Polish, so I can give you examples of that off the top of my head:
one pineapple -- jeden ananas
two pineapples -- dwa ananasy
five pineapples -- pięć ananasów
For Japanese, I guess this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals
@deshipu Is Polish [one, two, many] or are there more forms than that? This is great, by the way, thanks for this. I'll think about it a bit and figure out how I wanna add it to the post.
When I get around to it, I'll also try to remember to add your name to the "thanks" section. If you want that, how should I refer to you?
@benhamill So the rule is that numerals ending with 2, 3, or 4 get the first plural form, and the rest get the second. Other languages that have many plurals have other rules. This is actually handled by gettext to some degree, if you use the ngettext call. Of course, it won't handle such complex and context-dependent rules as in Japanse or Chinese.
There is no need for attribution, thank you.
@deshipu Thanks for pointing these out. 💖