Handling more complex languages

[Orestis Markou <orestis@…>]

Hello.

I'm Greek, and this isn't anything django-specific. I haven't seen any
project do this right, and it is *very* annoying for us Greeks.

You see, the Greek language has a lot of suffixes that change according
to the tense, person etc (I don't know all the english terminology).
Example:

English:

1) User
2) Add user

Greek:

1) Χρήστης (Xristis)
2) Προσθήκη Χρήστη (Xristi)

You see how 1 has a final "s" while 2 hasn't. In other cases there are
3 different forms.

The most annoying and important thing is dates. Not even google gets
this right. You see:

The month known as "November"
November, 7, 2006

But:

Ο μήνας γνωστός ως "Νοέμβριος" (Noembrios)
7 Νοεμβρίου 2006 (Noembriou)

So, when displaying months in a Calendar you have to display the first
form, while when displaying dates (eg. in a comment) you have to use
the second form.

I'm willing to provide a patch to django for this, and I thought about
hacking up DateFormater, but how should I go about this ? It isn't
something gettext can handle, there have to be different behaviors for
different languages.

In ​http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2282 I proposed creating
different files (that was js though) for different languages. Can
something like this be done for python ?

Should I post a ticket about this ?

[Orestis Markou <orestis@…>]

Comment from James Benett (from ​http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/b032d2c3186ff0c1/c6ce9e52d25c6c61?lnk=arm#c6ce9e52d25c6c61)

The English terminology is that nouns and adjectives "decline" based
on "case"; off the top of my head I'm not certain, but I think German
does as well (I took French and (classical) Greek in college, not
German); it might be worth looking at the 'de' translation files to
see how they handle it.

[hugo]

Well declinations of words isn't handled well at all - it's up to the translator to provide halfway useable translations, but some things just read weird and will allways read weird.

[Adrian Holovaty]

Closing for the reason hugo pointed out in the previous comment.