Re: [bug-gettext] Russian morphology

[Juri Linkov]

Hi Bruno,

>> Indeed, a complete implementation of all Russian morphological rules
>> takes ~1600 lines of dense Perl code:
>>
>> http://www.linkov.net/files/nlp/Lingua-RU-Inflect.pm
>
> Out of curiosity, what are the parameters that influence the
> declension, conjugation, inflection?
>   - Gender?
>   - Ordinal / cardinal number?
>   - what else?

The main lexical properties of words are:
- part of speech
- noun grammatical gender: masculine, feminine, neuter
- noun animacy: animate, inanimate
- verb grammatical aspect: perfective, imperfective
- verb transitivity: transitive/intransitive
- inflection type according to the classification from
  the Grammar Dictionary of Andrey Zaliznyak
  (the last great linguist of our time).

The main parameters that influence the declension are:
- grammatical case (one of 6 basic: nominative, genitive, dative,
  accusative, instrumental, prepositional, plus more than 3 additional)
- number: singular and plural.  Dual is not a grammatical number,
  it only influences the choice of cases for words after numerals:
  for 1    - nominative case, singular
  for 2..4 - genitive case, singular
  for 5..  - genitive case, plural (some words have an additional form
  called "count form", e.g. "5 байт" instead of genitive plural "5 байтов")

Fortunately, only the latter is needed for pluralization of gettext
messages because translators know all lexical properties of the words
used in translation, so they need just to select a proper case
for words after numbers from different categories.