William Reardon’s Blog

Building an international application, you run into some interesting linguist quirks.

Like pluralization.

That is, your software has to know how to say “1 widget” as opposed to “2 widgets.”

Putting aside the use of Arabic numbers, for each language you support, you have to know how to translate ‘widget’ into ‘cosa’ and ‘widgets’ into ‘cosas’.

Okay, so we use ‘widget’ if there’s one, otherwise we’ll use ‘widgets’, right? Pretty simple, that’s why there’s singular & plural right?

Wrong.

In English, we use plural for the empty case. Think about it — do you say “zero widget” or “zero widgets”?

Okay, so small tweak, we use singular for 1 and plural for everything else?

Well, that will work for most North America, but not Canada.

Why not?

Well, Canada bilingual laws are going to require you to translate into French. And in French, zero, the nullar case uses singular form, not plural.

And if you happen to speak Hebrew, you already know what’s coming next. If you have exactly two of something, some words can have dual form.

What about Chinese?

Actually, that’s easy: They lack any grammatical number. 0 件事, 1 件事, 2 件事, 3 件事, or 10 件事. They’re all 件事.

How bad can things get?

Well, some languages have trial form, for when there’s exactly three of something and paucal when there’s a few of something.

Turns out the Austronesian language Sursurunga takes the cake with singular, dual, paucal, greater paucal, and plural.

If you’re working on an international application, these Wikipedia pages are definitely worth the read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 10:15 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.