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Division Remainders in Plural Forms
- To: "Documentation and Translation" <doc at arabeyes dot org>
- Subject: Division Remainders in Plural Forms
- From: "Amr Gharbeia" <amr dot gharbeia at gmail dot com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 23:57:38 +0200
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An extended discussion between myself and Youssef Chahibi regarding
representation of Arabic plural forms resulted that the current
situation needs improvement. Chahibi was of the onpinion of making
things easier for everybody and adopting a right-to-left way of
pronouncing the numbers, and applying the grammar according to the
status of the digit last pronounced: 1563 would be ألف وخمسمائة وستون
وثلاث كتب, if I understood him really well. It works. It is good
Arabic. However, I spent a while consulting a number of Authorities in
Arabic. For example, Khalil Kalfat thinks it is falling out of use,
and is hardly Modern Standard Arabic.
My proposed plural forms solution, developed in cooperation with Alaa
Abdelfattah, uses the reading order we are all used to,
left-to-right), and is superior to previous solutions that it uses
division remainder to solve the cases of (100*n)+1 and (100*n)+2. Let
me try to list it for the sake of simplicity:
لا كتب
كتاب واحد
كتابان
3 - 10 كتب
11 - 99 كتابا
100 - 102 كتاب
103 -110 كتب
111 - 199 كتابا
200 - 202 كتاب
203 - 210 كتب
.
.
.
and so on
For the sake of recording a refrence on (100*n)+1 and (100*n)+2 cases,
let me quote one of the best explained refrences of MSA Grammar, معجم
قواعد اللغة العربية في جداول ولوحات, أنطوان الدحداح, مكتبة لبنان
ناشرون, الطبعة التاسعة:
"مميز العدد يكون دائماً مفرد إلا إذا كان مجرورا بالثلاثة إلى العشرة
فحينئذ يكون مجموعاً".
The syntax Alaa wrore is:
nplurals=6; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==0 ? 1 : n==2 ? 2 : n%100>=3 &&
n%100<=10 ? 3 : n%100>=11 && n%100<=99 ? 4 : 5;
For some reason, Alaa cannot make the zero case come first, so we
agreed that it comes second.