Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > The misconception of your proposal is assuming a pure algorithmic
  > inflection whereas actually inflection in Russian is dictionary-based
  > (in addition to algorithms that process words from the dictionary),

Maybe I did.  I see various meanings for "pure algorithmic", so I am
not sure whether I did, or did not, assume the point you have in mind.

  > i.e. to be able to inflect a word you need a large dictionary of all
  > words where each word in the dictionary has at least the following
  > lexical properties:
  > - part of speech
  > - noun grammatical gender: masculine, feminine, neuter
  > - noun animacy: animate, inanimate
  > - inflection type

It sounds like Russian has various declensions, like Latin.
Do I understand right?

If so, it is true that 'russian-nom' would require specification of
declensions.  Maybe `russian-masc' as well.

Are there standard names or codes for the declensions?  In Latin, each
declension has a number.  I think those numbers are standard in
teaching of Latin, so everyone who can read Latin knows those numbers,
and translators would find it natural to use a construct that
specifies the proper declension by number.

We would not have to implement all of them -- only those that
are useful enough to be worth implementing and documenting.
We would tell translators to handle the other declensions, and
the special exceptions, and the irregular plurals, using
lower-level constructs comparable to what gettext does now.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)