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Re: PR libc/5013: Bad gramar in fi_FI locale


Petter Reinholdtsen wrote on 2003-05-29:
> Hello
>
> I noticed your glibc problem report libc/5013 from 2003-05-02, where
> you write:
>
>   Date formats in Finnish locale are grammatically incorrect.  Month
>   name should be in partitive or in genitive form -- not in nominative
>   form.
>
>   Apply the attached patch which adds some extra letters to date
>   formats to produce grammatically correct partitive and genitive
>   forms from nominative (basic) forms.
>
> I tried 2003-05-09 to as you the following question using the glibc
> bug tracking system, but did not see any reply:
>
>   Please provide some source to make it possible for the glibc
>   maintainers to verify that your suggested change is correct.
>
> Did you try to contact the original author of the Finish locale and
> check if he agree to the change?  It seem to be Keld Simonsen.  I copy
> this email to him.

This is the third time I send this message. I haven't send any mail to
Keld Simonsen. I wasn't aware of him. I have send this message twice to
Petter Reinholdtsen but Apparently my messages have been lost on the way.
So, once again:

pere@gnu.org wrote on 2003-05-09:
> Synopsis: wrong date formats in fi_FI locale
>
> State-Changed-From-To: open->feedback
> State-Changed-By: pere
> State-Changed-When: Fri, 09 May 2003 17:51:08 -0400
> State-Changed-Why:
> Please provide some source to make it possible for the glibc
> maintainers to verify that your suggested change is correct.

You could look at the page
http://www.kotus.fi/kielitoimisto/oikeinkirjoitusohjeita/pilkku.shtml
Kotus is Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (see
http://www.kotus.fi/inenglish/).

The first page is about using commas in Finnish. But there is also a date
example which says there shall be no comma between the day of week and
the number of the date. The example on that page is:
    Neuvottelu pidettiin torstaina 13. maaliskuuta 2002.
In English:
    Negotiation took place on Thursday March 13 2002.

Thursday is "torstai" and March is "maaliskuu" in Finnish ("maaliskuuta"
is a partitive form). So according to that the right date format would be:
    %Ana %e. %Bta %Y

On the other hand, the basic form differs from that. So text such as
    Date: Thursday March 13 2002
would be
    Päivämäärä: torstai 13. maaliskuuta 2002
in Finnish. That can be produced using the pattern
    %A %e. %Bta %Y

Context sensitive patterns are not possible at the moment. So it is better
to use the short names of days which are same as the first two letters of
the long one. So reasonable good pattern would be:
    %a %e. %Bta %Y %T

You could also look at the main page of Finnish Broadcasting Company
(http://www.yle.fi). On the top right corner there is the current date.
But remember that the comma right after the day of week is grammatically
incorrect (see Kotus).

Finnish Standards Association SFS has a FAQ (http://www.sfs.fi/faq.html,
in Finnish only). The answer the to question 12 says dates should be
presented using SFS-EN 28601 standard (ISO 8601:1988). However, that is
not a native form. The answer uses an example:
    lokakuun 9. päivä vuonna 1998
In English:
    October 9 1998

October is "lokakuu" ("lokakuun" is a genetive form). Words "päivä" and
"vuonna" are "day" and "in year" in English and can therefor be omitted.
So date_fmt field could be:
    %a %Bn %e. %H:%M:%S %Z %Y

These patterns are the ones I used in the patch I send earlier.


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