Follow-up Comment #1, patch #2064 (project freeciv):
The final binding string for longer-than-two lists should be ", or " rather
than " or " if (and only if) you plan on including the comma in the original
generation string. That is, if you plan to do "foo, bar, or baz" rather than
"foo, bar or baz" in the source code, then the comma should be translateable
separately for the final binding rather than included from the generic comma
translation. Ditto for 'and'.
Two reasons: 1) In Finnish, we don't include the final comma ever. 2) In e.g.
Lojban, you translate the comma for and-lists as "and" as well, so you get a
double-and in the end if the translated comma is manually included.
As a general rule, you want to minimize the use of concatenating fragments as
opposed to using more flexible "%s or %s" style of strings (where the first %s
could be a comma-separated list, I expect). While Lojban apparently can use
connectors like " or " everywhere, it's also possible to say stuff which
essentially comes out as "and foo bar baz" in Lojban - i.e. the and is not
between any of the parameters.
The target of the listing, e.g. nouns vs. adjectives, singulars or plurals,
make no difference for Finnish.
For Lojban, there's a distinct difference between an inclusive or and an
exclusive or. There's also some different binding words beyond 'and' and 'or'
that are used in these meanings, but I got the impression that these cases
probably don't apply in Freeciv in the places where you use for loops to
build lists.
Sini Ruohomaa
PS. Yeah, Lojban is an artificial language, I can't remember if we're being
translated into it already or not.
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