Re: ordinal numbers

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Chris Scaife wrote:
> I have been studying internationalization with gettext and am writing
> it up as tutorial which I hope to put on the web somewhere.
> 
> I have applied techniques for plurals to ORDINAL enumerations.

>               gettext("In the human race you come in %d%s position!\n"),
>               i, dngettext("_ordinal", "°","°", i)

Such an approach won't work, because languages are more different than
you think. You are extrapolating from English to other languages and
forgetting the rule "Entire sentences" from
  <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Preparing-Strings.html>

The word "position" has a gender in many languages, and you cannot expext
gender-dependent flexions to follow simple string concatenation rules. It
does not work this way for Ukrainian, in particular.

The best known workaround is to write things like this:

  switch (i) {
    case 1: gettext("In the human race you come in first position!\n"); break;
    case 2: gettext("In the human race you come in second position!\n"); break;
    case 3: gettext("In the human race you come in third position!\n"); break;
    default: asprintf (gettext("In the human race you come at position %d!\n"), 
i); break;
  }

Bruno