• Rootbeer (unregistered)

    The root of this WTF is that a programmer saw that there was a need to handle singular and plural forms in the English language, and chose to roll their own solution for it.

    Clearly, this was an unprecedented problem in the fifty-plus-year history of text processing.

  • Qŭert (unregistered)

    Looking at these comments, I think it's time to have an Esperanto version of this site.

    It could be called “La ĉiutaga «Kia Merdo!»” or something like that.

    Since Esperanto is a regular language, I guess the site will be ready by April. ;-)

  • Travis (unregistered) in reply to Ben Jammin

    Taking a quick look at it, it's got octopus and virus wrong... the correct plurals are "octopuses" (or "octopodes", if you want to follow the Greek) and "viruses".

  • cappeca (unregistered) in reply to bob
    bob:
    Nagesh:
    eros:
    Anon:
    It's English. English is nothing *but* special cases. Every pattern has at least one exception (mouse -> mice, louse -> lice, but house -/-> hice). And then there's the pluralizations using foreign patterns (cactus -> cacti, etc.)
    Yeah, spoken language is a bitch, eh? Amazing how people make common things easier/quicker to say.

    matter of fact, speaking is easy than writing.

    Only an idiot would make that statement, since spoken and written English are identical.

    Yeah, wrrrrrrrrite.

  • (cs) in reply to mh
    mh:
    That is not possible in localized applications. E.g. Japanese uses different number suffix based on class of object (e.g. flat objects are counted differently than other objects). Some slavic languages use 3 different suffixes based on number, not just singular and plural, e.g. in Slovak 1 pes (1 dog), 2-4 psy (2-4 dogs), 5-inf psov (5-inf dogs). That is just what I know, and I am no linguist. I am sure you could find other languages even weirder than that. There is no way you can cover all that in a maintainable way, best is not to even try an design your UI in a way that avoids pluralization.

    That is totally freaky. I did say ignoring duals. It seems there are some other cases out there. Our translation team handles the actual translation. Our pattern is as described and I've never heard of complaints. We're only newly in Japan though, and we don't support any Slavik languages that I know of.

    best is not to even try an design your UI in a way that avoids pluralization.

    I'm pretty sure that writing a contorted interface that looks wrong to 99% of your customers to please the Swedes and the Japanese counts as a WTF. Unless you specialize in software that counts the numbers of dogs and whether or not they are flat.

  • (cs) in reply to cappeca
    cappeca:
    bob:
    Nagesh:
    eros:
    Anon:
    It's English. English is nothing *but* special cases. Every pattern has at least one exception (mouse -> mice, louse -> lice, but house -/-> hice). And then there's the pluralizations using foreign patterns (cactus -> cacti, etc.)
    Yeah, spoken language is a bitch, eh? Amazing how people make common things easier/quicker to say.

    matter of fact, speaking is easy than writing.

    Only an idiot would make that statement, since spoken and written English are identical.

    Yeah, wrrrrrrrrite.

    Ignore bob, he's putting stuff on just for people to react to it. Smart fish get the worm, but never get trap on fishermen lines.

  • fool (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler

    Likely there's two 'names' for items on each localization - singular and plural.

    This would do away with the special case handling, and avoid recodes whenever you had to add a language that used different rules.

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