
Pluralization rules around the world - lucb1e
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Localization/Localization_and_Plurals
======
cperciva
This reminds me of an old Russian joke. A Soviet factory has six fireplaces
and only one fireplace poker; rather than carrying the poker around every time
they need to use it, they decide that they should get five more so that they
can keep one at each fireplace.

At this point you need to understand a big of Russian grammar. As mentioned in
the link, Russian has different forms for -ending-in-1 numbers, -ending-
in-2-through-4 numbers, and -ending-in-5-through-9 numbers. Also, the third
set of plurals are often irregular.

This being a _Soviet_ factory, the requisition for fireplace pokers needs to
be sent with all the correct paperwork to the bureaucracy. A debate arises:
What is the appropriate plural for _kocherga_? Send the form out with the
wrong word, and the wrath of the Soviet bureaucracy will fall upon them.

After arguing back and forth for a while, an old janitor hears the
conversation and proposes a solution: Send in a requisition asking for three
kochergi and two more kochergi. A few months later, they get their fireplace
pokers along with a note: "Here are the four kochergi and one more kocherga
which you requested."

~~~
yosito
I'm fascinated by this joke, but I have to admit, I don't get it.

~~~
hamstergene
Basically, a lot of Russians have no idea how to say 5 pieces of kocherga.
Factory workers think they can't spell it because they are just uneducated,
but the reply they get suggests that the management has no idea either.
Honestly, I couldn't say it myself before I looked it up when writing this
reply, even though I've heard the joke before. The word is untypical.

~~~
gcb0
what are the words? I'm curious but not knowing russian I have no idea how to
even search for this

~~~
Symbiote
Just look the word up in a dictionary and find the declension box.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%8...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B0)

So kočergá, kočergí, kočerjóg.

English declension is so simple we don't include this information in a typical
dictionary entry. ("Poker, pokers, poker's, pokers'")

~~~
tom_mellior
"Just" looking it up occurred to me too, but that table doesn't help if you
don't also point out that for some reason it's entry for the genitive plural
that we're looking for.

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mormegil
_The_ source for plural rules (with machine-readable representation) can be
found in the Unicode CLDR:
[http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/33/supplemental/language_...](http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/33/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html)

~~~
schoen
Wow, this is super-awesome!

But I think the Brazilian Portuguese rule in this chart for the cardinal 0 is
wrong: I think it should be "other" (0 pontos) rather than "one" (0 ponto),
just as in Spanish, English, and European Portuguese.

I've sent a note to a native speaker to check my intuition.

~~~
gugagore
Native speaker and my judgement matches yours. I was surprised to see that on
the page.

------
nkoren
In case anybody needs another, similar rabbit hole to get lost in:
[http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html](http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html)

------
teraflop
In case anyone else was wondering about form #14 which is marked "unused":
apparently earlier versions of Firefox incorrectly used it for Macedonian.
Firefox 59+ uses form #15 instead:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415906)

~~~
AnssiH
Note that that bug was just a documentation issue (see comment #21) - Firefox
already used form #15 even before version 59.

Version control shows Firefox has used form #15 for Macedonian at least since
2012:
[https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/mk/annotate/d13b2b460aeb...](https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/mk/annotate/d13b2b460aeb/toolkit/chrome/global/intl.properties)

------
seaish
Did you get there from here?
[https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-244](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-244)

~~~
wyldfire
I keep hearing about this game. Is it any good?

~~~
oldcynic
Automating a factory, then redo it so the ratios are right, then again so it's
more efficient, then add trains. There's also the circuit system for
automating further and doing fancy things like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=indN4kcshB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=indN4kcshB0)

It's also quite[0] addictive. You may find you burn a _lot_ of hours.

Exceptional value for money if it's your sort of thing.

[0] The Cracktorio nickname is well deserved.

~~~
teddyh
In the interest of giving context, here is the original video¹ which was
impressively recreated in Factorio:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJrY3p9nzVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJrY3p9nzVY)

1\. Well, the original file was copied around the Internet well before
YouTube, but that is the original video re-encoded in higher resolution and
uploaded to YouTube.

Further reading: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/holiday-light-show-
videos](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/holiday-light-show-videos)

------
stevula
Why are Latin/Greek listed together under rule #1? They may have shared
cultural history but they’re not closely related aside from being in the very
large Indoeuropean family. Latin should be with the Romanic languages if
anything.

Also, it’s a bit naïve to say that a declined language only has 1-2 forms
without taking into account oblique cases, but that’s a hard thing to deal
with programmatically.

~~~
Asooka
This is about how many forms of a phrase are needed to cover all cases. You
have a list of phrase templates for each phrase where the number gets
substituted in and the number of templates for each phrase depends on the
language rule. So for Russian you have 3 templates and if the number is 31,
you use template 1, but if it's 0, you use template 3. The relevant word is
already declined in the proper case. This isn't about programmaticaly
pluralising a single word, it's just so you can select a phrase template.

------
greggman
does this really cover all these cases?

[http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale-
Maketext/lib/Locale/Maket...](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale-
Maketext/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod#A_Localization_Horror_Story:_It_Could_Happen_To_You)

------
yongjik
> Families: Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), ...

I can't complain, but what an odd name for that "family"!

(...which is not actually a family, by the way.)

~~~
gnulinux
I was struck by this too. Chinese and Japanese/Korean are exteremely different
languages. Japanese is an agglutinative language whereas Chinese is analytic.
Japanese is probably organically more similar to English (if it is at all)
than Chinese. But one needs to note that Chinese affected a lot of Asian
languages and what we used to call Altai Language family (Turkic, Mongolic,
Japonic languages) was actually bunch of different agglutinative languages
aggressively affected by Chinese (and each other) which made linguists confuse
for decades. Note that Altai Language family does not exist, those languages
are not related at all (which is another mistake in the website)

------
blahedo
It says it's about number, but then in the Examples section, Sorbian lists
three nominative forms and one genitive. But not all the genitive forms, just
the plural form. And no other cases. I'm... confused about how this is
supposed to work.

------
tom_mellior
Weird that Hungarian is listed under rule #1, it should be under #0: Nouns
preceded by numbers are always in the _singular_ in Hungarian. Does anyone
know for the other Finno-Ugric languages listed under #1 (Estonian, Finnish)?

~~~
systoll
Despite the title, the page describes a function, not the language grammar as
a whole.

Hungarian has plural forms. kutya = dog, kutyák = dogs. They follow the same
pattern as english.

The plurals are used way less often, as [roughly] the language doesn't
pluralise when it's redundant. But that's outside the scope of PluralForm.,
and it's up to its users to avoid `PluralForm.get`ting phrases which already
tell you the quantity.

[That said, the Chinese example should probably be reworded. The stated reason
applies to Hungarian, but it's not the whole reason they're in #0.]

~~~
tom_mellior
> it's up to its users to avoid `PluralForm.get`ting phrases which already
> tell you the quantity.

You mean one should _not_ use `PluralForm.get` to generate snippets of the
form "0 pages", "1 page", "2 pages"? Because if that's what you mean, you are
directly contradicting all of the examples on the page.

~~~
systoll
All the concrete examples on the page are English — so they use plural forms
when English does.

That said, my wording did needlessly assume one of two approaches. The
'downloads' example shows both.

PluralForm is often called at the whole-phrase level, for all languages,
rather than as at an 'atomic' level, at the points where specific languages
pluralise things. This contrast is shown in the 'downloads' example.

In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice, if
the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.

This pops up in English too. For instance,
chrome://browser/locale/downloads/downloads.properties contains:

shortHours=h;h

shortMinutes=m;m

shortSeconds=s;s

And a multiplayer game might need

ready=Are You Ready?;Are You Ready?

As most languages have a singular 'you'.

~~~
tom_mellior
> All the concrete examples on the page are English — so they use plural forms
> when English does.

... which are all cases where Hungarian doesn't use the plural, which is why
Hungarian shouldn't be in the same group as English.

> In this use pattern, the correct approach is to write the same thing twice,
> if the 'plural form' of the matches the singular one.

... except if the plural form _always_ matches the singular one, in which case
the correct approach is to write the thing once. Category #0.

Thanks for your efforts, but you have clarified nothing with regards to
Hungarian.

~~~
systoll
> except if the plural form always matches the singular one

Hungarian has plural forms which are distinct from the singular.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase)

Otherwise, yeah, they'd be in group 0.

------
acjohnson55
In some cases, I can guess the logic behind the rule, (e.g. "twenty and one
second" type idioms) but in other cases, I can't really fathom why it would be
so complicated.

~~~
wyattpeak
While I couldn't comment on how they evolved (and I suspect there are many
different answers), I'd point out that English has a very complicated pattern
for ordinals:

1, ends in 1 except 11, 111...: -st

2, ends in 2 except 12, 112...: -nd

3, ends in 3 except 13, 113...: -rd

everything else: -th

(also 0, most people say zeroth but nobody really feels comfortable with it.)

However they came to be, there's no mental load in applying them and nobody
who speaks English natively ever much thinks about it.

~~~
acjohnson55
Yeah, totally agree that there are plenty of things that don't make sense in
English. The grammar is easy, but the sure number of irregular froms has got
to be really difficult to deal with. At least the rules for plurals in some of
the more complex examples are reegular.

