[bug #62876] Vietnamese should have two plural forms, not one

[Minh Nguyễn]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62876>

                 Summary: Vietnamese should have two plural forms, not one
                 Project: GNU gettext
               Submitter: mxn
               Submitted: Mon 08 Aug 2022 06:46:13 AM UTC
                Category: Plural forms
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any


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Follow-up Comments:


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Date: Mon 08 Aug 2022 06:46:13 AM UTC By: Minh Nguyễn <mxn>
gettext currently claims that Vietnamese has only one plural form
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=blob;f=gettext-tools/src/plural-table.c;h=f5756ab6f11879980a6ac49d2ffcab842415868a;hb=HEAD#l29>.
This is incorrect: although Vietnamese does not inflect nouns based on
grammatical number, it does have plural markers, and demonstrative pronouns
also vary by number.

The plural rule in Vietnamese should be:


nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);


To illustrate the need for a second plural form:

* You have 1 chicken in your cart; do you want to buy *it*? Yes, I want to buy
the chicken.
** _Bạn có $1 con gà trong giỏ hàng; bạn có muốn mua *nó* không?
Có, tôi muốn mua con gà._
* You have 2 chickens in your cart; do you want to buy *them*? Yes, I want to
buy the chickens.
** _Bạn có $1 con gà trong giỏ hàng; bạn có muốn mua *chúng*
không? Có, tôi muốn mua *các* con gà._

This is a contrived example, but the bug does have practical effects, for
example forcing the buttons in dialog boxes to contain “(các)”,
equivalent to equivocating in English with the suffix “(s)”.

For more information about Vietnamese plural markers or demonstrative
pronouns, any basic introduction to Vietnamese grammar
<https://books.google.com/books?id=7fg5yO_5B5IC&pg=PA95> may be consulted.

The incorrect data was introduced in 2009
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=commit;h=d78c911e16a5d2a15febfa1112c88612a9bb0a0b>
and has since spread through many other projects. The CLDR
<https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/CLDR-14273> project has accepted a
proposal to add a second plural form in principle, though it is currently held
up by a somewhat related change that is probably irrelevant to gettext. There
are also parallel discussions in Launchpad
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1976309> and Mozilla
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1426808#c22>.







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