Re: Computer Number Concord

From: Prai Jei (pvstownsend_at_zyx-abc.fsnet.co.uk)
Date: 01/09/05 

Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 22:14:32 +0000

Jukka K. Korpela (or somebody else of the same name) wrote thusly in message
<Xns95D9EC346C960jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.0.31>:

> Prai Jei <pvstownsend@zyx-abc.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Your name sounds Finnish. How do you handle the multiple declined and
>> conjugated forms of nouns in your language for such messages?
>
> For phrases like "N warning(s)", for different values of N, Finnish needs
> to distinguish between N = 1 and all other values, as English. But the
> generation of the other form is generally more complex than in English,
> where you simply append "s" to the noun's singular form, with some
> exceptions. In Finnish, different suffixes are needed, and quite often the
> word stem changes too. (Contrary to common descriptions, Finnish is rather
> far from being a purely agglutinative language.)
>
> This means, in effect, that a routine for printing expressions like
> "N foo(s)", for different values of number N and noun foo, basically need
> three parameters: N, foo, and the form of foo to be used when N is
> different from 1. This is essentially what such a general routine needs to
> have for English as well, to cover different exceptional plurals like man
> ~ men. And this is how people generally do such things in programming,
> unless they choose the easy way corresponding to "N warning(s)".

AIUI if there's one you use the nominative singular, for more than one you
use the partitive singular after a number. The same construction occurs in
Welsh, particularly in numbers greater than about 10:

One man yksi mies un dyn
Twenty men kaksi kymmentä miestä dauddeg o dyn
Men miehet dynion

Any automatic message generator would need to have the singular and plural
forms (and dual, if applicable) coded up separately to allow for
"irregular" plurals or where several plural endings are available - Welsh
-ion is just one of about half a dozen "regular" plural suffixes in use. 

-- 
Paul Townsend
Pair them off into threes
Interchange the alphabetic letter groups to reply

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