Re: Emacs i18n

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 10:06 AM Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

> 'russian-neut' selects numbers that require a neuter ending, in
> Russian.  You use it with a string that contains the neuter ending.
>
> If this does not work, why not?

You are conflating three grammatical categories: the number, the
gender, and the declension type.

Gender and declension type are attributes of the noun, and are fixed
with respect to the noun. So if your message is about bytes, your
translator knows to use noun endings according to declension type 1a
and verb endings for masculine gender; there is nothing left for the
machine to guess. (Gender of the noun also affects the form of the
numeral if it is spelled out, but for computer-generated messages we
usually do not do that and just use digits.)

Number depends on the numeral’s value and affects the forms of the
noun, and any adjectives and verbs attached to it. Singular number
applies to values than end in 1, except for values that end in 11.
Dual number applies to values that end in 2..4, again, except for
values that end in 12..14. Plural number applies to everything else.
Any grammatical number can apply to any noun, so the translator will
provide all three wordings and let the machine select one using the
above logic.

Your example would work if you changed -masc, -fem and -neut to -sing,
-dual and -pl. But that is, as Paul mentioned, reinventing
ngettext(3).