Re: [libreoffice-l10n] [ANNOUNCE] added possessive genitive case month names, HEADS UP localizers ; -)

On Saturday 19 November 2011, Mihkel Tõnnov wrote:
> 2011/11/19 Eike Rathke <erack@redhat.com>
> > In a recent build you can check use of month noun versus possessive
> > month in the number formatter if you compiled your new locale data with
> > a make in i18npool (note: execute make twice to be sure the new data is
> > available, it seems that due to some shortcoming in the current makefile
> > setup some dependencies are missing). If the format code contains month
> > (MMM or MMMM) and day of month (D or DD) the possessive name is
> > displayed, else (no D or DD code) the noun is displayed.
> >
> > Where exactly is this going to be used -- Calc's date-formatted cells,
>
> Writer's date-fields, ...?
> And will it be strictly one way or the other, or will users be able to
> choose which form (nominative/inflected) they want in a given context?
> I ask because in Estonian both forms (and more :P ) could be used,
> depending on sentence.

Similar problem with Finnish. We need to use genitive or partitive depending 
on whether the month name comes before or after the day of month. So you can 
write the date for today either as

  "marraskuun 19. 2011" (genitive) or
  "19. marraskuuta 2011" (partitive)

Currently this is not much of a problem for us since using spelled (as opposed 
to numeric) months is quite uncommon. We can also work around the problem by 
using custom date formats: MMMM"n" for genitive and MMMM"ta" for partitive 
month name. This happens to be possible because all month names are inflected 
from nominative to genitive or partitive with exactly same suffix.

This workaround would no longer work if all date formats containing day of 
month would automatically substitute MMMM with genitive form. Thus we probably 
should not add <GenitiveMonths> for Finnish at this point. But the feature is 
nice anyway and with a small extension (support for partitive forms) could 
make our date formats much easier to work with.

Harri

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