Re: Arabic plural forms issues

["Djihed Afifi" <djihedlists at googlemail dot com>]

Thank you Chahibi for the insightful wrap up of plural form issues.

I'm marking all plural forms fuzzy for now and hope we will make a
decision soon. The sooner it is done, the better.

Regarding argument omitting, I posted a message to gnome-dev with no
reply yet. I may seek an answer from kde-dev as well. A hacki'sh
solution would be to include the number in parenthesis , eg (%d).

If possible, I urge any arabeyes member who has contact with a respect
Arabic scholar/Dr to review the plural form with us, this way we will
have an approved form once and for all. I might try to do that during
my stay at home in August time permitting.

>    We may sometimes need to translate applications that don't support plural
> form for their simplicity, and use for example "user(s)" in English. I
> suggest to contact the developer and ask him/her to support plural forms, if
> for some reasons this can't be done, we can use "من" as in "وصل ثلاثة من
> الرجال" . (Thank you Munzir for the idea).

I think that would be definitly a bug of the part of the developer.

Djihed

On 26/07/06, Youssef Chahibi <chahibi at gmail dot com> wrote:
> السلام عليكم
>    The current plural form gettext equation used in Gnome, KDE and probably in
> other projects is wrong [5]. I know that QAC investigated this issues but it
> didn't decide on a definitive solution, so it is clear that the current
> plural form expression is a temporary hack and of course confirmed as wrong.
> In http://wiki.arabeyes.org/QacDecisions:
>
> >  This GNU Plural Header will be used when we can find a way to script its
> > functionality: nplurals = 7;
> >  plurals = n==0 ? 0 : n==1 ? 1 : n==2 ? 2 : n%100>=3 && n%100<=10 ? 3 :
> > n%100==1 ? 5 : n%100==2 ? 6 : 4;
>
>    Arabic follows sophisticated rules to decide on the form of the "counted"
> items. Moreover, there are two distinct rules, one if numbers are read from
> the right to the left and an other if they are read from the left to the
> right, as the form of counted items follows the last number.
>    Both rules are correct, studies confirm that in the past both rules were
> allowed, however reading from the right to the left - following the order of
> the letters in Arabic - is the more respected rule, and nowadays medias use
> reading from the left to the right.
>    Since there are two rules, we need decide on one and only one to use in the
> translations. Reading from the left to the right is not implementable at all
> as a gettext formula first, and second to substract 1 or 2 from the variable.
> See [1]. Reading from the right to the left is implementable [2] and with
> less cases (6) compared with (8) in the other. I am not sure if this is only
> correct if we assume that "101 كتاب" is read "واحد ومئة كتاب" and not "مئة
> كتاب وكتاب", see [2].
>   The current plural form is not clear, not documented and linguistically
> wrong. 0 and a mysterious case (4th) were merged, the rule for numbers from
> 11-99 is not there.
>   Conclusion: The right-to-left form is the one to choose [2].
>
>    Plural forms 0, 1 and 2 don't require a variable, and here comes another
> issue. If two variables are included in the string, say %s and %d, and
> that %d is omitted this leads the application to crash (Segmentation fault)
> [3]. A solution exists, it is to use variable shuffling, which displays a
> correct result and doesn't crash [4]. This need be documented and tested for
> other implementations other than C. (Thank you Djihed for the idea)
>
>    One other issue is what form to use for non-integer numbers.

>    What can we do?
> - Comment on this
> - Mark all strings that contain plural forms as fuzzy, and replace the formula
> in all files with the help of a script. Correct these fuzzy strings to add
> missing cases.
>
>
>
> [1] http://perso.menara.ma/yollnet/pluralforms1.png
> [2] nplurals=6; plural=n == 0 ? 0 : n == 1 ? 1 : n == 2 ? 2 : n >= 3 && n <=
> 10 ? 3 : n >= 11 && n <= 99 ? 4 : 5;
> [3] echo 'int main() { printf("%s \n", 2, "text");}' > test.c ; gcc -w
> test.c -o output ; ./output
> [4] echo 'int main() { printf("%2$s \n", 2, "text");}' > test.c ; gcc -w
> test.c -o output ; ./output
> [5] Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==2 ? 1 : n>=3 && n<=10 ? 2 :
> 3;
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