An extended discussion between myself and Youssef Chahibi regarding representation of Arabic plural forms resulted that the current situation needs improvement. Chahibi was of the onpinion of making things easier for everybody and adopting a right-to-left way of pronouncing the numbers, and applying the grammar according to the status of the digit last pronounced: 1563 would be ألف وخمسمائة وستون وثلاث كتب, if I understood him really well. It works. It is good Arabic. However, I spent a while consulting a number of Authorities in Arabic. For example, Khalil Kalfat thinks it is falling out of use, and is hardly Modern Standard Arabic.
My proposed plural forms solution, developed in cooperation with Alaa Abdelfattah, uses the reading order we are all used to, left-to-right), and is superior to previous solutions that it uses division remainder to solve the cases of (100*n)+1 and (100*n)+2. Let me try to list it for the sake of simplicity: لا كتب كتاب واحد كتابان 3 - 10 كتب 11 - 99 كتابا 100 - 102 كتاب 103 -110 كتب 111 - 199 كتابا 200 - 202 كتاب 203 - 210 كتب . . . and so on For the sake of recording a refrence on (100*n)+1 and (100*n)+2 cases, let me quote one of the best explained refrences of MSA Grammar, معجم قواعد اللغة العربية في جداول ولوحات, أنطوان الدحداح, مكتبة لبنان ناشرون, الطبعة التاسعة: "مميز العدد يكون دائماً مفرد إلا إذا كان مجرورا بالثلاثة إلى العشرة فحينئذ يكون مجموعاً". The syntax Alaa wrore is: nplurals=6; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==0 ? 1 : n==2 ? 2 : n%100>=3 && n%100<=10 ? 3 : n%100>=11 && n%100<=99 ? 4 : 5; For some reason, Alaa cannot make the zero case come first, so we agreed that it comes second.
_______________________________________________ Doc mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/doc
