From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs i18n Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:31:56 -0400 Message-ID: References: <87o97aq6gz.fsf@jidanni.org> <87tvgoud56.fsf@mail.linkov.net> <83o96wk2mi.fsf@gnu.org> <87k1hjfvjd.fsf@mail.linkov.net> <871s3p0zdz.fsf@mail.linkov.net> <83h8ckezyt.fsf@gnu.org> <83o96qegv1.fsf@gnu.org> <32b1ab1b-bef4-629a-8830-b1dcc6915087@cs.ucla.edu> <83a7iae9va.fsf@gnu.org> <05ed2dec-2a84-f7dc-1af5-c9d923992785@cs.ucla.edu> <87bm2p56gu.fsf@mail.linkov.net> <837edbdg33.fsf@gnu.org> <65e3fe78-3264-12ff-1edf-a05bfd86a9a9@cs.ucla.edu> <19b02ea5-c5e2-29a6-c037-f7481490f92a@cs.ucla.edu> <21308168-e809-13f3-2e12-b8456efab836@cs.ucla.edu> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 Injection-Info: blaine.gmane.org; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:195.159.176.226"; logging-data="85953"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@blaine.gmane.org" Cc: eliz@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org, lokedhs@gmail.com, juri@linkov.net To: Paul Eggert Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Mar 12 04:32:15 2019 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:256) (Exim 4.89) (envelope-from ) id 1h3Y9F-000MFg-W0 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 12 Mar 2019 04:32:14 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:44393 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h3Y9E-0001MM-SX for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:32:12 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([209.51.188.92]:57200) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h3Y91-0001K6-0b for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:32:00 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:48444) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h3Y8z-0003nK-W0; Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:31:58 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1h3Y8y-0007DK-Sn; Mon, 11 Mar 2019 23:31:57 -0400 In-Reply-To: <21308168-e809-13f3-2e12-b8456efab836@cs.ucla.edu> (message from Paul Eggert on Sun, 10 Mar 2019 20:52:47 -0700) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:234090 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > I can envision something like this: > > > > "russian-nom:%d байт%| скопирован%|, %s, %s" > > > > where the 'russian-nom' operator would replace the two %| sequences > > with the appropriate declensional suffixes for the nominative case. > But Russian declension is not that simple. The Russian word for "byte" is > "байт", but its plural form depends not only on the number (as in the above > examples) but also in its case: Yes, of course. I anticipated that. That is why I called the construct 'russian-nom', and specified that it provides "the appropriate declensional suffixes for the nominative case." We could define similar constructs for some of the other cases in Russian, whichever ones translators would want to use. the "байт" and "байта" in the above examples are not exhaustive. No problem. Nobody supposed that they were. And some words have irregular declensions: I anticipated that, too. The low-level forms 'russian-masc' and friends can handle all such situations. In them you can specify the precise conjugated forms for the irregular words in the message. > nd it's not just nouns and > pronouns that are affected: adjectives also have singular and plural forms. 'russian-masc' and friends allow explicit conjugation of any parts of speech. > And we'd have > to deal with the fact that not every Russian-speaker agrees with how to decline > words like "байт" that are imported from English. The translator is always welcome to use the low-level constructs 'russian-masc' and friends, to exercise explicit control over that. > I have by no means exhausted the issues involved here; to get a better feeling > for the complexity in this area, please see: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_declension I don't need to understand all the details of Russian numbers. I've designed a method so flexible that it can handle any such complexities. > And we'd also have to > implement and document similarly tricky rules for other languages. No, we don't. With my approach, we don't _have to_ implement any of these specific solutions. We can implement whichever ones we like. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)