Feedback on Turkish Pluralization - Solution with Vowel Harmony

[hasanbeder]

Dear Puter Developers, I am writing to provide feedback on the Turkish language support in Puter, specifically regarding the issue of pluralization. Currently, the static "plural_suffix" value does not account for the complexities of Turkish grammar, particularly vowel harmony, leading to inaccuracies.

Proposed Solution: Vowel Harmony-Based Pluralization

Turkish has a vowel harmony system where the vowels within a word must be compatible. This harmony affects the suffixes added to words, including the plural suffix.

1. Identifying Vowel Harmony:

• The solution involves analyzing the last vowel of a word's stem.
• If the vowel is a back vowel (a, ı, o, u), the plural suffix "-lar" is used.
• If the vowel is a front vowel (e, i, ö, ü), the plural suffix "-ler" is used.

2. Handling Exceptions:

• Some words have irregular plural forms or do not follow vowel harmony rules. A list of these exceptions will be created, and the function will apply the appropriate plural form for these words.

3. Implementation:

• This solution can be implemented as a function within the language file.
• The function would take a word as input and return the word with the correct plural suffix based on vowel harmony and exceptions.

Example Code (JavaScript):

function pluralize(word) {
  const lastVowel = word.slice(-1);
  const backVowels = ["a", "ı", "o", "u"];
  const exceptions = {
    diş: "dişler",
    insan: "insan"
    // ... other exceptions
  };

  if (exceptions[word]) {
    return exceptions[word];
  }

  if (backVowels.includes(lastVowel)) {
    return word + "lar";
  } else {
    return word + "ler";
  }
}

I believe that implementing a vowel harmony-based pluralization system will greatly enhance the quality of Puter's Turkish language support.

Sincerely.

[AtkinsSJ]

Every language has its own different way of handling plurals, with its own exceptions. I would personally suggest we try something similar to Android's quantity strings. Then, the translator just writes the different cases themselves, and the software doesn't need to know anything about grammar.

[KernelDeimos]

+1 on a pluralize function, but exceptions should be in the language's data file rather than the function itself. I think each language having it's own (optional) pluralize function as a fallback for manual entries is a pretty neat idea. This is effectively a hybrid of the two options that were proposed here.