6 ms·

Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above),

by mrfoto 12y ago

Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above), they repeat at mod 100 (so 101 is singular, 102 dual,…), it's an inflectional language with 3 grammatical genders, sentence should take a different form depending on whether the user is male or female,…

gambiting 12y ago
I was just trying to think of how it would work out in Polish.... directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be: 1 katalog 2 katalogi 3 katalogi 4 katalogi 5 katalogów 6 katalogów ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say: ....1 katalogu ....2 katalogach ....3 katalogach ....1000 katalogów (for 1001 even I am not sure if you should say katalogów or katalogach, both sound correct to me) ...and again, the whole thing changes depending on the speaker being male/female + singular/plural("I have found"/"we have found"). Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy.
- mrfoto 12y ago
  1 imenik 2 imenika 3 imeniki 4 imeniki 5 imenikov 6 imenikov … 101 imenik 102 imenika 103 imeniki … 201 imenik … 1001 imenik … Slavic languages are f*d up :D
  - Swizec 12y ago
    Not to mention that I would never realise that "imenik" means directory. An imenik is a phone book. Potentially the Contacts app on my phone. But never a directory. I think this has to do with vocabulary registers as well. We've learned to use English words for computer things. Using Slovene translations just feels weird unless they're a bastardisation of the English word. Similar to how English uses French words for foods because cuisine was a thing of the elite and they didn't eat pig, they ate porc.
    - pif 12y ago
      But, a directory is a phone book!
      - Swizec 12y ago
        To you. To me it very much is not because as a kid I learned that directory is that thing on the computer where the other files are. Things like that are difficult to shake off no matter how well you know a language.
      - SixSigma 12y ago
        Surely a phone book is a directory, not the other way round.
- Swizec 12y ago
  > Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy. And thus is solved the mystery all us Slavic speakers have such good English. Especially on the online. Because nobody had the guts to localize to our languages. If they did localize to our languages "Omg this looks weird and smells off", we all cried. And switched our interfaces to English. Admit it, you did this in High School or even Middle School because the <insert slavic language> translation just didn't make sense. And so all of us who are now in a position to localize these interfaces don't because it seems silly and pointless. We come full circle. Younglings after us use computers in English because no good localization exists.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    Yeah. I remember being a kid and HATING Polish translations of English games. Even though I barely knew any English playing any game in Polish just felt wrong. Nowadays I think it just felt more mysterious and interesting if apart from being difficult, the game was in a language I couldn't fully understand. But yeah, it contributed massively to me learning English, so it was definitely a good thing. But I also know what you mean - I wouldn't translate my programs to Polish unless I had to, because it just feels wrong to have them in my native tongue.
    - Swizec 12y ago
      I think the poor understanding of English was part of the problem. We didn't understand, we just knew that you found what you need when you click "Insert" or whatever. To us "insert" didn't mean insert, it meant "That menu where you find an Image to put in your document". In our mind the English word and its native translation have semantically different meanings. I discover this problem a lot now that I'm older. I understand the words and their translations, but they still mean semantically different things to me in different languages. The funniest part is how when I'm in the US I know all the English words for pots and pans and stuff, but when I'm home in Slovenia and my girlfriend is here, it becomes almost impossible to translate. Because in Slovenia the pots and pans have Slovenian names, in the US they have English names. And to me those are completely different.
- tinganho 12y ago
  ICU's messageformat solves this easily. One project that supports ICU's messageformat is L10ns http://l10ns.org http://l10ns.org
  - tinganho 12y ago
    Here is more info about the plural format of ICU's messageformat. http://l10ns.org/docs.html#pluralformat http://l10ns.org/docs.html#pluralformat.
  - ygra 12y ago
    This looks quite nice and powerful and indeed an elegant way of solving the problem with multiple plural forms in a string. The only concern I have with that syntax is that it's yet another DSL, or markup language and translators need to know it, or could get it wrong. Granted, a program for helping translators might do automatic linting (much as Qt's Linguist already warns if you omit placeholders from the translated phrase that are there in the original). Another thing is that the mini-language grows complex enough that the resulting text can be quite hard to read and understand: {people, plural, offset:1 =0{No one went.} =1{{user1} went.} =2{{user1} and {user2} went}.} other{{user1} and # others went}}. is just a single (or two) placeholder and it takes a while to even parse how it's supposed to work.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Well, if we're going to introduce that level of complexity into a DSL, why not go full Turing-Complete and write it in code? (case (length folks) (0 "No one went.") (1 ((elt 0 folks) " user went.")) (2 ((elt 0 folks) " and " (elt 1 folks) " went.")) (otherwise ((elt 0 folks) " and " (length folks) " others went."))) You can wrap that in a lambda that concatenates resulting strings and voilà, you have "smart" string tables. And it's not a problem to make it even more DSL-y and translator friendly.
      - ygra 12y ago
        And then you have the exact same problem as if you'd write that logic in your source code. Just with half a dozen layers of abstraction, a more cumbersome way of displaying strings in your application and another programming language on top. I'd say that's not a net positive.
- nathell 12y ago
  And don't even get me started at the case where you don't know the noun beforehand and need to synthesize the entire numeral phrase at runtime ("You have %d %s.") Because, in Polish, numerals inflect in gender and case, come in two main variants ("normal" and "collective", and that's not including ordinals), and can (but not necessarily have to) for some genders undergo case changes that affect the verb part of the sentence under certain circumstances. Add to this the fact that there's even no definitive consensus on how many grammatical genders there are in Polish (opinions range from 3 to 9, with some of the theories based on numeral connectivity), and you're all set. The Polish word "dwa" (two) has at least seventeen distinct grammatical forms, each of which has arcane rules that govern its usage.
- kruczek 12y ago
  > ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) Not so lucky there either: ....21 katalogów ....22 katalogi ....23 katalogi ....24 katalogi ....25 katalogów And the same pattern repeats modulo 10. EDIT: And as I think about the 1001 part... Actually the following sounds right to me (translating "in X directories"): ....w 1000 katalogów (w tysiącu katalogów) ....w 1001 katalogu (w tysiąc-jednym katalogu) ....w 1002 katalogach (w tysiąc-dwóch katalogach) etc.
lepouet 12y ago
Wikipedia mention only singular, dual and plural ? What is the one for 3 and 4 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar
- lepouet 12y ago
  I think i found the solution here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29
- mrfoto 12y ago
  No idea how it's officially called, but I'm not making this up :D http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/pluralforms.html http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/plu...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eginhard 12y ago
  It's the normal plural, but 3 and 4 take the nominative, while other numbers take the genitive plural.
po 12y ago
Just curious... are Slovene web services more likely to ask your gender after you sign up so they can get the grammar right or do they just go with 'male' or something?
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Russian speaker here; I don't think it would be relevant, since services ought to be addressing you in second person, which I believe is gender-neutral in just about every Slavic language.

by mrfoto 12y ago

gambiting 12y ago

I was just trying to think of how it would work out in Polish.... directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be: 1 katalog 2 katalogi 3 katalogi 4 katalogi 5 katalogów 6 katalogów ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say: ....1 katalogu ....2 katalogach ....3 katalogach ....1000 katalogów (for 1001 even I am not sure if you should say katalogów or katalogach, both sound correct to me) ...and again, the whole thing changes depending on the speaker being male/female + singular/plural("I have found"/"we have found"). Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy.

mrfoto 12y ago
1 imenik 2 imenika 3 imeniki 4 imeniki 5 imenikov 6 imenikov … 101 imenik 102 imenika 103 imeniki … 201 imenik … 1001 imenik … Slavic languages are f*d up :D
- Swizec 12y ago
  Not to mention that I would never realise that "imenik" means directory. An imenik is a phone book. Potentially the Contacts app on my phone. But never a directory. I think this has to do with vocabulary registers as well. We've learned to use English words for computer things. Using Slovene translations just feels weird unless they're a bastardisation of the English word. Similar to how English uses French words for foods because cuisine was a thing of the elite and they didn't eat pig, they ate porc.
  - pif 12y ago
    But, a directory is a phone book!
    - Swizec 12y ago
      To you. To me it very much is not because as a kid I learned that directory is that thing on the computer where the other files are. Things like that are difficult to shake off no matter how well you know a language.
    - SixSigma 12y ago
      Surely a phone book is a directory, not the other way round.
Swizec 12y ago
> Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy. And thus is solved the mystery all us Slavic speakers have such good English. Especially on the online. Because nobody had the guts to localize to our languages. If they did localize to our languages "Omg this looks weird and smells off", we all cried. And switched our interfaces to English. Admit it, you did this in High School or even Middle School because the <insert slavic language> translation just didn't make sense. And so all of us who are now in a position to localize these interfaces don't because it seems silly and pointless. We come full circle. Younglings after us use computers in English because no good localization exists.
- gambiting 12y ago
  Yeah. I remember being a kid and HATING Polish translations of English games. Even though I barely knew any English playing any game in Polish just felt wrong. Nowadays I think it just felt more mysterious and interesting if apart from being difficult, the game was in a language I couldn't fully understand. But yeah, it contributed massively to me learning English, so it was definitely a good thing. But I also know what you mean - I wouldn't translate my programs to Polish unless I had to, because it just feels wrong to have them in my native tongue.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    I think the poor understanding of English was part of the problem. We didn't understand, we just knew that you found what you need when you click "Insert" or whatever. To us "insert" didn't mean insert, it meant "That menu where you find an Image to put in your document". In our mind the English word and its native translation have semantically different meanings. I discover this problem a lot now that I'm older. I understand the words and their translations, but they still mean semantically different things to me in different languages. The funniest part is how when I'm in the US I know all the English words for pots and pans and stuff, but when I'm home in Slovenia and my girlfriend is here, it becomes almost impossible to translate. Because in Slovenia the pots and pans have Slovenian names, in the US they have English names. And to me those are completely different.
tinganho 12y ago
ICU's messageformat solves this easily. One project that supports ICU's messageformat is L10ns http://l10ns.org http://l10ns.org
- tinganho 12y ago
  Here is more info about the plural format of ICU's messageformat. http://l10ns.org/docs.html#pluralformat http://l10ns.org/docs.html#pluralformat.
- ygra 12y ago
  This looks quite nice and powerful and indeed an elegant way of solving the problem with multiple plural forms in a string. The only concern I have with that syntax is that it's yet another DSL, or markup language and translators need to know it, or could get it wrong. Granted, a program for helping translators might do automatic linting (much as Qt's Linguist already warns if you omit placeholders from the translated phrase that are there in the original). Another thing is that the mini-language grows complex enough that the resulting text can be quite hard to read and understand: {people, plural, offset:1 =0{No one went.} =1{{user1} went.} =2{{user1} and {user2} went}.} other{{user1} and # others went}}. is just a single (or two) placeholder and it takes a while to even parse how it's supposed to work.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well, if we're going to introduce that level of complexity into a DSL, why not go full Turing-Complete and write it in code? (case (length folks) (0 "No one went.") (1 ((elt 0 folks) " user went.")) (2 ((elt 0 folks) " and " (elt 1 folks) " went.")) (otherwise ((elt 0 folks) " and " (length folks) " others went."))) You can wrap that in a lambda that concatenates resulting strings and voilà, you have "smart" string tables. And it's not a problem to make it even more DSL-y and translator friendly.
    - ygra 12y ago
      And then you have the exact same problem as if you'd write that logic in your source code. Just with half a dozen layers of abstraction, a more cumbersome way of displaying strings in your application and another programming language on top. I'd say that's not a net positive.
nathell 12y ago
And don't even get me started at the case where you don't know the noun beforehand and need to synthesize the entire numeral phrase at runtime ("You have %d %s.") Because, in Polish, numerals inflect in gender and case, come in two main variants ("normal" and "collective", and that's not including ordinals), and can (but not necessarily have to) for some genders undergo case changes that affect the verb part of the sentence under certain circumstances. Add to this the fact that there's even no definitive consensus on how many grammatical genders there are in Polish (opinions range from 3 to 9, with some of the theories based on numeral connectivity), and you're all set. The Polish word "dwa" (two) has at least seventeen distinct grammatical forms, each of which has arcane rules that govern its usage.
kruczek 12y ago
> ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) Not so lucky there either: ....21 katalogów ....22 katalogi ....23 katalogi ....24 katalogi ....25 katalogów And the same pattern repeats modulo 10. EDIT: And as I think about the 1001 part... Actually the following sounds right to me (translating "in X directories"): ....w 1000 katalogów (w tysiącu katalogów) ....w 1001 katalogu (w tysiąc-jednym katalogu) ....w 1002 katalogach (w tysiąc-dwóch katalogach) etc.

lepouet 12y ago

Wikipedia mention only singular, dual and plural ? What is the one for 3 and 4 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar

lepouet 12y ago
I think i found the solution here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28grammatical_number%29
mrfoto 12y ago
No idea how it's officially called, but I'm not making this up :D http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/pluralforms.html http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/plu...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
eginhard 12y ago
It's the normal plural, but 3 and 4 take the nominative, while other numbers take the genitive plural.

po 12y ago

Just curious... are Slovene web services more likely to ask your gender after you sign up so they can get the grammar right or do they just go with 'male' or something?

pavel_lishin 12y ago
Russian speaker here; I don't think it would be relevant, since services ought to be addressing you in second person, which I believe is gender-neutral in just about every Slavic language.