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

["digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com" <sourceware-bugzilla at sourceware dot org>]

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

--- Comment #27 from Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak at lingonborough dot com> ---
(In reply to Soslan Khubulov from comment #24)
> (In reply to Rafal Luzynski from comment #23)
> > Thank you for your review. alt_mon is currently capitalized in this patch.
> > Did you mean anything different?
> 
> I meant mon. Sorry for that.

Locale data should follow the grammar rules of respective languages.  Are there
rules in Ossetian which say that the month name should always be capitalized,
like in English, German and few more languages?  This page:
https://os.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%8B says "26 майы" which
is lowercase.  If this is correct then mon should be lowercase, same as CLDR
provides.  Uppercasing alt_mon is not obligatory but both glibc and CLDR
provide so and I will not change it without need.

> > BTW, what do you think about abbreviated month names? Currently in glibc we
> > have all Ossetian month names abbreviated to 3 letters. CLDR [1] provides
> > 3-4 letters plus a dot unless whole word is 3 or 4 letters long. As a
> > consequence some "abbreviated" month names have their inflection visible:
> > "Май" -> "майы", "Июнь" -> "июны" and so on. Also, the abbreviated
> > standalone (nominative?) forms are all capitalized.
> 
> I think consistency is more important. If other locales in glibc use 3
> letter abbreviations then Ossetian locale should use 3 letters too. As for
> usability, both styles are equally recognizable.

There is no requirement that they should be 3 letters.  Some languages follow
that rule, some do not.  But if this is recognizable then I will not change it
unless you request.

> > While at this, what is the correct English name: Ossetian (Wikipedia says
> > so) or Ossetic (CLDR says so)?
> 
> Both are correct, but IMO Ossetian is more modern.

I will not change it for now, either.

(In reply to Egmont Koblinger from comment #25)
> [...]
> That's not the case, see e.g. bug 192 and bug 22848. IMO use whichever is
> grammatically correct / better / more typically used etc. in the given
> language.

I fully agree, the locale data should follow the grammar rules.

(In reply to keld@keldix.com from comment #26)
> [...]
> IMHO as we are speaking about POSIX locales, so we should use POSIX style
> names, that
> is, oriented towards POSIX utilities use. CLDR is not oriented towards POSIX
> use.

I don't remember where I read this but someone wrote that those POSIX rules
apply to English language, not to other languages.  POSIX authors are not aware
of every language in the world, therefore the rules are occasionally amended to
support more languages.

> [...]
> And I am still uncertain that what glibc is doing now is following the POSIX
> standard.
> POSIX has recently (within the last couple of years) adressed the genitive
> month names problem,
> in a way compatible with BSD. I have not yet gotten around to verifying that
> glibc is
> following POSIX here.

If you mean the bug 10871 then in a part which refers to the full month names
it strictly follows the rules of BSD, also follows the update which has been
accepted by POSIX in 2010 but not yet published.  Therefore until it is
published we call it "GNU extension" rather than "POSIX compatible".

Regarding the part which refers to the abbreviated month names the rules are
similar but nobody except glibc so far implemented or proposed it.  POSIX has
been asked to accept this as part of their standard but it may take another 10
years.  For now we call it a genuine GNU extension. :-)

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