Karl Eichwalder <ke@suse.de> さんは書きました:

"The NetsaSoft Foundation GLP" <netsasoft@gmail.com> writes:

...

I'm interested in starting a translation project.

Name: Alemayehu Gemeda Language: Amharic (am) Novell login: netsasoft Contact email: netsasoft@gmail.com

...

Alemayehu alias Alex

Hello Alemayehu,

thanks for your interest! Before starting with translation, we must make sure, a font suitable for displaying Amharic is available for openSUSE. Mike, will you please check it?

We have a suitable font since openSUSE 10.3. Family name: "Abyssinica SIL" File name: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Abyssinica_SIL.ttf Package name: sil-abyssinica :lang=aa|am|ast|ay|bi|br|ch|co|da|de|en|es|et|eu|fi|fj|fo|fr|fur|fy|gd|gez|gl|gv|ho|ia|id|ie|io|is|it|lb|mg|nb|nds|nl|nn|no|oc|om|pt|rm|sma|smj|so|sq|sv|sw|tig|tn|ts|vo|vot|wa|xh|yap|zu mfabian@magellan:~$

Once we know this I will initialize the *.am.po files and give you commit permissions.

-- Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。 I � Unicode --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org

Karl Eichwalder wrote:

Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> writes:

Only one form: Some languages only require one single form. There is no distinction between the singular and plural form. [...] Turkic/Altaic family Turkish [...]

Sorry to step in, but this seems incomplete. Turkish is my native language and I can help with the rules if necessary. It is true that we say: 1 elma (1 apple) 2 elma (2 apples) ...but we also distinguish between: Elma güzel. (The apple is nice) Elmalar güzel. (The apples are nice) which is similar to the Hungarian case. The languages are more than similar when it comes to grammar. This distinction is made only between one and many, we do not have more than one plural form like "dual". The plural suffix is either -ler or -lar, depending on the vowel harmony, see also: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Plural . --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org

Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Karl. Yes, although there is one widely used plural form, Amharic(Ethiopic) does have additional forms. Karl, the manual is defiantly going to be of a great help. Thanks again. So, what's the next step? On 10/12/07, Karl Eichwalder <ke@suse.de> wrote:

Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> writes:

...

We have a suitable font since openSUSE 10.3.

Family name: "Abyssinica SIL" File name: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Abyssinica_SIL.ttf Package name: sil-abyssinica

:lang=aa|am|ast|ay|bi|br|ch|co|da|de|en|es|et|eu|fi|fj|fo|fr|fur|fy|gd|gez|gl|gv|ho|ia|id|ie|io|is|it|lb|mg|nb|nds|nl|nn|no|oc|om|pt|rm|sma|smj|so|sq|sv|sw|tig|tn|ts|vo|vot|wa|xh|yap|zu

That's great--thanks for verifying, Mike.

Alex, is there more than 1 plural form in your language? Please, translate:

0 (zero) trees 1 (one) tree 2 (two) trees 3 trees 10 trees 100 trees

For more info about plural form, see the gettext manual:

... After the first complaints from people internationalizing the code people either completely avoided formulations like this or used strings like `"file(s)"'. Both look unnatural and should be avoided. First tries to solve the problem correctly looked like this:

if (n == 1) printf ("%d file deleted", n); else printf ("%d files deleted", n);

But this does not solve the problem. It helps languages where the plural form of a noun is not simply constructed by adding an `s' but that is all. Once again people fell into the trap of believing the rules their language is using are universal. But the handling of plural forms differs widely between the language families. For example, Rafal Maszkowski `<rzm@mat.uni.torun.pl>' reports:

In Polish we use e.g. plik (file) this way: 1 plik 2,3,4 pliki 5-21 pliko'w 22-24 pliki 25-31 pliko'w and so on (o' means 8859-2 oacute which should be rather okreska, similar to aogonek).

There are two things which can differ between languages (and even inside language families);

* The form how plural forms are built differs. This is a problem with languages which have many irregularities. German, for instance, is a drastic case. Though English and German are part of the same language family (Germanic), the almost regular forming of plural noun forms (appending an `s') is hardly found in German.

* The number of plural forms differ. This is somewhat surprising for those who only have experiences with Romanic and Germanic languages since here the number is the same (there are two).

But other language families have only one form or many forms. More information on this in an extra section.

...

The information about the plural form selection has to be stored in the header entry of the PO file (the one with the empty `msgid' string). The plural form information looks like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n == 1 ? 0 : 1;

The `nplurals' value must be a decimal number which specifies how many different plural forms exist for this language. The string following `plural' is an expression which is using the C language syntax. Exceptions are that no negative numbers are allowed, numbers must be decimal, and the only variable allowed is `n'. Spaces are allowed in the expression, but backslash-newlines are not; in the examples below the backslash-newlines are present for formatting purposes only. This expression will be evaluated whenever one of the functions `ngettext', `dngettext', or `dcngettext' is called. The numeric value passed to these functions is then substituted for all uses of the variable `n' in the expression. The resulting value then must be greater or equal to zero and smaller than the value given as the value of `nplurals'.

The following rules are known at this point. The language with families are listed. But this does not necessarily mean the information can be generalized for the whole family (as can be easily seen in the table below).(1)

Only one form: Some languages only require one single form. There is no distinction between the singular and plural form. An appropriate header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;

Languages with this property include:

Asian family Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese

Turkic/Altaic family Turkish

Two forms, singular used for one only This is the form used in most existing programs since it is what English is using. A header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1;

(Note: this uses the feature of C expressions that boolean expressions have to value zero or one.)

Languages with this property include:

Germanic family Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, German, Norwegian, Swedish

Finno-Ugric family Estonian, Finnish

Latin/Greek family Greek

Semitic family Hebrew

Romanic family Italian, Portuguese, Spanish

Artificial Esperanto

Another language using the same header entry is:

Finno-Ugric family Hungarian

Hungarian does not appear to have a plural if you look at sentences involving cardinal numbers. For example, "1 apple" is "1 alma", and "123 apples" is "123 alma". But when the number is not explicit, the distinction between singular and plural exists: "the apple" is "az alma", and "the apples" is "az alma'k". Since `ngettext' has to support both types of sentences, it is classified here, under "two forms".

Two forms, singular used for zero and one Exceptional case in the language family. The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n>1;

Languages with this property include:

Romanic family French, Brazilian Portuguese

Three forms, special case for zero The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n != 0 ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Baltic family Latvian

Three forms, special cases for one and two The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==2 ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Celtic Gaeilge (Irish)

Three forms, special case for numbers ending in 00 or [2-9][0-9] The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n==1 ? 0 : (n==0 || (n%100 > 0 && n%100 < 20)) ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Romanic family Romanian

Three forms, special case for numbers ending in 1[2-9] The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : \ n%10>=2 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Baltic family Lithuanian

Three forms, special cases for numbers ending in 1 and 2, 3, 4, except those ending in 1[1-4] The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : \ n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian

Three forms, special cases for 1 and 2, 3, 4 The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=(n==1) ? 0 : (n>=2 && n<=4) ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family Slovak, Czech

Three forms, special case for one and some numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \ plural=n==1 ? 0 : \ n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family Polish

Four forms, special case for one and all numbers ending in 02, 03, or 04 The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; \ plural=n%100==1 ? 0 : n%100==2 ? 1 : n%100==3 || n%100==4 ? 2 : 3;

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family Slovenian

-- Karl Eichwalder R&D / Documentation

SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg)

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Karl Eichwalder <ke@suse.de> さんは書きました:

As a fully qualified locale, we should probably use am_ET.

am_ET.UTF-8 (am_ET is UTF-8 as well, but better make it clear). -- Mike FABIAN <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。 I � Unicode --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org