[bug-gettext] [bug #45591] Slovenian plural string to be changed in documentation

[Primoz Peterlin]

Follow-up Comment #15, bug #45591 (project gettext):

As someone who has been contributing Slovene translations for GNU programs for
over 20 years, let me add my 2 cents. Reading the whole thread, I believe I
can summarize the positions of Bruno and Bernard as following:

Bruno: We tried to find a single, simple and general rule for all languages
covered by gettext. In the system we have, the singular form is assigned to
the first element in the array, and all the others follow. The first element
of the array happens to be indexed by 0.

Bernard: In Slovene, the form for "5 or more" happens to coincide with the
form for "0", so it is more practical to permute the indices and start with
the form which covers both "5 or more" and "0", which is then assigned the
index 0, singular form is assigned the index 1, dual form is assigned the
index 2, and the form for "3 or 4" is assigned the index 3. The rule for
Slovene currently listed is not incorrect, but it is impractical and the
translators use the permuted one.

This is not a linguistic issue. It is merely a question whether to stick with
a uniform rule for all or allow a small deviation. We are not seeking an
universal truth here. The convention to index the first element of an array
with 0 is also just a convention used by C and many other programming
languages, but in fortran, for example, the first element of the array is
indexed by 1 (fortran 90 made this more flexible, though).

I am certainly lacking the broad overview over different languages that I know
Bruno has, but at least English would equally benefit from the same
rearrangement. The present scheme leads, for example, to:

0: "1 file moved"
1: "0 files moved"

I am _not_ suggesting that other languages should change their rules, though.
:)

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