this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
28 points (93.8% liked)

Programming

17499 readers
27 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cgtjsiwy 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As a Finnish speaker, I just can't see generic localisation systems like Fluent working with agglutinative languages. For instance, consider the Polish example for Firefox Account from Fluent's front page:

-sync-brand-name = {$case ->
   *[nominative] Konto Firefox
    [genitive] Konta Firefox
    [accusative] Kontem Firefox
}

In Finnish, this would be called Firefox-tili. Tili means account and belongs to the Kotus type 5 words, which specifies how the word is inflected with various suffixes. Fluent doesn't support agglutination, so you'd have to specify every form of the word separately:

-sync-brand-name = {$case ->
    [nominative] Firefox-tili
    [partitive] Firefox-tiliä
    ... 10ish more inflections
    [nominative first person] Firefox-tilini
    [partitive first person] Firefox-tiliäni
    ... 10ish more inflections
    ... the above inflections but for 2nd and 3rd persons
    [nominative first person plural] Firefox-tilimme
    [partitive first person plural] Firefox-tiliämme
    ... 10ish more inflections
    ... the above inflections but for 2nd and 3rd persons plural
    [nominative first person questioning] Firefox-tilinikö
    [no idea what this is even called] Firefox-tilittömänäkin
    [no idea what this is even called 2] Firefox-tililleensäkään
    ... lots more
}

Ideally, you'd only specify that Firefox-tili is a type 5 word and the system generates all of that boilerplate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't know finnish, all of these are different ways to say "firefox account"? That's wild

[–] cgtjsiwy 11 points 9 months ago

all of these are different ways to say “firefox account”?

Basically yes. The idea is that each suffix represents something that's typically a separate word in English, and you can mix and match suffixes just as you'd mix words.

  • my account -> tilini
  • to an account -> tilille
  • to my account -> tililleni
  • to my account too -> tilillenikin