New plural rules for Scots Gaelic (gd)
Oh happy days :) Thanks everybody who helped!
Old thread, but just asking a clarification. The CLDR ticket http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/2883 has 4 forms(One, Two, Few, Other). And Mediawiiki has 6 forms. Do you have plans to make the CLDR plural forms same as medawiki plural forms?
Anyone can contribute to CLDR in theory, same as for translatewiki.net. Please see our page on CLDR for a quick overview. Please note that there is a difference in treatment of plural rules on CLDR and translatewiki.net. Up until now CLDR has in practice given the impression that their PLURAL rules only cover situations where numbers appear in a sentence. Mediawiki uses plural in sentences without numbers as well as with numbers. Please see Talk:CLDR#Difference_between_CLDR_plural_rules_and_MediaWiki_plural_rules_6182this discussion and feel free to contribute, both to that discussion and to the related ticket on CLDR. I had better add that CLDR is a very good place to practice the virtues of patience and perseverance.
The plural rules are the same both on CLDR and here. However, there are technical reasons why Wikipedia requires more "forms". If you read carefully, both the CLDR rules and Wikipedia rules amount to the following ruleset: 1, 11 > Form 1 2, 12 > Form 2 3-10, 13-19 > Form 3 0, Any other > Form 4
But for some technical reason, you can't bunch together numbers like that in Wikipedia so we got 1 > Form 1a 11 > Form 1b 2 > Form 2a 12 > Form 2b or to that effect.
There are no technical reasons preventing from doing that. See the previous comment by Lloffiwr.
If you expand all the comments above, you'll see that it was Lloffiwr who okayed the current solution. The reason is (according to Lloffiwr) that Wiki logic looks for a plural for anything above 1 but that in Gaelic, 11 patterns with 1 (i.e. 1 of something and 11 of something is treated the same, as if it was singular). The only workable solution that was mooted at the time was to split these apart, counting 11 as a fake plural.
I'm a great believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" ... why the sudden rush to change something that's working fine?
Akerbeltz- the comment from Santosh.thottingal of 27.1.12 does not propose any changes to translatewiki.net. It does discuss whether we, the translatewiki.net community, wish to request changes to CLDR. My comment as a fellow translator at translatewiki.net, with no more authority to "OKay" anything than any other translator, and as someone with a very small amount of experience contributing to CLDR, is that any application to change the PLURAL rules for Scots Gaelic at CLDR had better be addressed to them directly.
As to the question of whether the PLURAL rules work for CLDR, you will see by following the links provided above in my comment of 28 January 2012, that the issue at stake is; how are the software writers using the CLDR rules using PLURAL in their programmes. If they use PLURAL only in sentences which also contain a digit, then (if I understood your explanations of Scots Gaelic grammar above correctly), the software translators will be able to produce grammatically correct sentences for all numbers using the 4 rules only. However, if software writers also use PLURAL in sentences where no number appears, then the two additional cases are needed. CLDR have clarified that they do want PLURAL rules to cover situations where no numbers appear in a sentence (see the link to CLDR above) and therefore Scots Gaelic speakers may conclude that they wish to apply to CLDR to expand the PLURAL rule set to 6. As you are no doubt aware, the downside of having more rules is that the translators have more work to do in forming translations using PLURAL.
The rules at CLDR are fine. I handled the plural submission and the xml locale data submission for Scots Gaelic there. I raised the issue we had here and I was told that this is not necessary regarding the data held at CLDR on Gaelic plurals.
PS the rules at CLDR are also the same we use on Mozilla, LibreOffice and several other projects and they all produce the right forms. You may remember that I was rather surprised that they wouldn't work here the way they're intended to work so if anything needs tweaking, it's withing Wiki, not CLDR or the other projects.