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

Hi Harri,

On Saturday, 2011-11-19 22:12:50 +0200, Harri Pitkänen wrote:

> 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)

Does this mean that Finnish actually uses three forms of month names,
nominative, genitive and partitive? fi_FI.xml contains "marraskuu" for
November, so it looks like.

Hmm.. I could add also a partitive form to locale data and use that in
the number formatter. Is the rule simply always that if the day precedes
the month the genitive is used, and if the day follows the month the
partitive is used?

Might get complicated if other locales used yet different rules.

> 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.

Reasonably not.

> 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.

I could get that in quite easily if the rule is simply what I assumed
above.

  Eike

-- 
LibreOffice Calc developer. Number formatter stricken i18n transpositionizer.
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