[Bug localedata/23140] More languages need two forms of month names

[digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23140

--- Comment #7 from Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com> ---
(In reply to Michael Bauer from comment #4)
> This applies to Scottish Gaelic indeed (gd-GB) but they're not genitives
> though, they're partitives - and I think other languages will be using other
> grammatical patterns too, so perhaps the naming should be more general, like
> "inflected month name" rather than genitive?

Thank you for this update. The documentation never uses the term "genitive" nor
"nominative". I often use the term "genitive" because: (1) it is shorter than
"a  form used when the month name forms part of the date"; (2) so far I have
not known about any language which requires other case than genitive; (3) a
genitive case is a good example of a form required to format a date.

> Anyway, starting with January, the inflected forms are as follows:
> [ cut ]

Thank you. This is already provided by CLDR and I have patches ready for
Scottish Gaelic and several other languages as well. I am going to attach them
in the beginning of the next week. I will appreciate a final review, though.


(In reply to Michael Wolf from comment #5)
> Upper Sorbian:
> 
> Nominative             Accusative                Genitive
> [...]

Thank you. Unfortunately, we are unable to support more than 2 cases. This is a
minimum required to format a date. I guess that the correct case for Upper
Sorbian when formatting a date is genitive. Supporting more cases is a task for
a natural language translating and processing tool, not for strftime() function
from glibc. Again, I have a patch for the Upper Sorbian and I am going to
attach it next week.

> Meja "May" is an exceptional case: It is the only month name that has
> feminine gender. Therefore its nominative and accusative are not identical.
> Besides it has the ending -e in genitive instead of -a.

That's very interesting, thank you.

> With the month names
> for september, oktober, nowember and december, the vowel "e" is elided
> before the consonant "r".

OK, I am familiar with these phenomenons because they are the same in my native
language.

> Lower Sorbian:
> 
> Nominative             Accusative                Genitive
> [...]

As I said above, Lower Sorbian is not supported by glibc. I'll be happy to add
it, though, especially since I see it supported by CLDR. Can you please open a
separate ticket and (even better) provide a patch? If you can't then tell me so
I will do it but I will need an assistance to complete the task.

> [...]
> There is a fourth grammatical case that often occurs: The locative. It
> mainly occurs behind the preposition w "in":
> 
> w januarje "in January"
> [...]

As I said above, we can't support more than two cases. This would be useful to
generate natural language sentences and maybe in some more applications but it
is not absolutely necessary for strftime() function to display dates correctly.

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