Re: [Gramps-users] Locations: "at" vs "in"

[Algis K. <aka...@pc...>]

Brian,

On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 07:56:35 Brian Matherly wrote:
> > >> Gramps' display uses "in" for
> >
> > locations whereas the narr. web page uses
> >
> > >> "at". This bugs me a little bit, so I
> >
> > thought that I'd file a bug
> >
> > >> report, suggesting "at" as preferable.
> >
> > Do other native English speakers
> >
> > >> have a preference?
> >
> > The most convenient would probably be to have an extra text
> > entry (or
> > preferably a combo box) with a selection of place
> > prepositions (by,
> > in, at etc).  We have excactly the same issue in Norewgian,
> > so such a
> > feature would be very much appreciated.  I guess it would
> > impose some
> > work to add support for this in the database though.  What
> > do you core
> > developers think of this?
>
> It's a neat idea. It would certainly add some flexibility. But not all
> languages work the same. So I think it would make translation impossible.
>
> ~Brian

Absolutely right, Brian.  Germanic (Norwegian, Swedish, English, German) 
languages keep the the name ends unchanged, regardless of context.  

Many non-Germanic Indo-European languages do change their endings. This is 
true of Baltic (viz. in Lithuanian my son's surname would be Kabaila, my 
daughter's surname would be Kabailaitė, my wife's Kabailienė. And I would 
live in "Kabailos" [not Kabaila's!]  home.  Something very similar happens in 
Slavonic languages - Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Croatian etc.).

The only serious answer to this question would be to allow a fussy user to do 
all such changes in a hand-typed text, particularly since the Latin 1 simply 
does not have all the phonetic characters, required by some languages. And, 
of course, it does not have the Cyrillic, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese scripts, 
either).  As it stands, It is very intelligent of gramps to enable the 
substitutions in all often used scripts.  Machine translations so far had 
only a very limited success.

It is ingenious for utf-8 to assign a number for each  character of all of the 
above and more. Of course, the glyphs for each one of those numbers can and 
often do have a large number of permutations.

It is very much a question of personal preference. And it is impossible to 
satisfy all of them all of the time.

OldAl.

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