New plural rules for Scots Gaelic (gd)
Can I ask whether the whole sentence should be negated in Scots Gaelic, if the number is 0? Does Scots Gaelic use singular or plural forms with 0? Even if the grammar for 0 is different to English, this will not necessarily trigger an extra form in MediaWiki. There are two languages, Swahili and Manx, where sentences negate for 0, but where discussion (on Support, can't remember when) led to the conclusion that the number of times the grammar will be wrong in MediaWiki is negligible. This is because usually, two separate English messages are created where 0 is a possibility, because they prefer to use 'no' instead of '0'. There is a message on the recent changes page where 0 does occasionally occur as part of the PLURAL function. There may be others. In Welsh, however, we chose to include 0 as a form, which of course is more work, but also more flexible.
However, on CLDR, you might prefer to mention this (if 0 does trigger grammar changes in Scots Gaelic), and you may prefer to include 0 as a possibility here on translatewiki.net in case it is needed in current or future projects other than MediaWiki. The advice on CLDR (I don't have the link handy just now) is to document any grammar changes caused by plural numbers, not just changes to the noun forms.
Also, are you sure that you want 1 and 11 together as one form? Are there any grammar differences between 1 and 11 other than noun plurals? For example, is the translation of 'There is/are 1/11 sub-category/ies to this category' the same in Scots Gaelic?
0 does not trigger any changes not covered by the four forms (it would be 0 + Form 4). But I take it you mean if a sentence like "there are 0 users logged in" would be "there are 0 users logged in" or "there are no users logged in"? The second would be more natural but it would not be a major problem if we had "there are 0 users logged in" in Gaelic.
Yes, 1 and 11 go together because in Gaelic 1 cause a morphophonemic change; as 11 is treated as 1 NOUN 10, the same rule applies, for example: 1 chat - in words aon (1) chat 11 chat - in words aon (1) chat deug (10)
Beyond that, no, there are no other chages (such as the is/are difference in English). In Gaelic the verb only reflects the status of declarative/interrogative/negative but does not change with number (fortunately... there is enough bizarre stuff going on!).
What I meant with negating a sentence for 0, is that in both Welsh and Manx we would say 'there ARE NOT 0 users logged in' instead of 'there ARE 0 users logged in' - the negative form of the verb is used. And in Welsh it sticks out like a sore thumb to have the sentence use a positive verb form. Would be interested to know whether Scots Gaelic uses negative or positive verbs for discussing nothing; in other words, do you use the convention that nothing EXISTS (as in English) or nothing DOESN'T EXIST (as in Welsh/Manx)?:-)
Ah right I see what you mean. No, it would be a declarative (positive) sentence, very similar to English, for example tha 0 cleachdaichean air logadh a-steach "be 0 users after logging in".
My replies are not showing up on support also! A bug somewhere?
Back to the point. That's interesting. Thank you for the explanations. I think that you need to explicitly add 0 to the group using form 4 - the folks at CLDR will probably ask about this.