Countries where Aymara (ay) is spoken officially

Thank you for that information, I have updated the information accordingly.

Do you also have information about the number of plural forms in this language? The number includes the singular form, so English, for example, has 2 plural forms. How many does Aymara have?

Henning

Yes, should I give you the info here or make a new ticket? Anyway I needed to do some research to explain plurals correctly because I’m not sure how it will be used in the software. But plurals aren’t so straight forward like in English or Spanish, often linguists distinguish what they call Radio/TV Aymara from spoken Aymara, since the language is used in a Spanish influenced environment often news are written first in Spanish and passed to the host who in the rush translates the plural “-s” ending of Spanish automatically with the suffix “-naka-” in Aymara; in which case plurals should work fine with the: nplurals=2, n != 1 form.

But that’s not precisely correct and it’s often criticized, because in Aymara plurals are optional, only used in case of confusion; besides Aymara works with a suffix system where you can add –naka- to the noun, –p- to the verb or both to express the same.

When talking about zero often the words janiwa, jani or jan are used which can be translated to “without...{something}” while talking about objects (-naka- is optional as said before) and “muruqu” when talking about the number 0.

With one or two objects people add the prefixes mä-, pä- respectively. And there is also a distinction when you are talking about all the objects or some of them adding the suffix –pacha, for example if you have three windows opened and you want to close two of them you would call them “pät’uxu” (t’uxu= window) but if you want to close the three of them you should refer to them as t’uxpacha.

I hope that’s all the information necessary.

Pedro

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Judging from your first paragraph, you could live with 2 plural forms. If the plural is optional you are still free to fill in the same text for both singular and plural.

So unless you have any objections, I'd go with your suggestion of nplural=2 , n != 1.

Yes I agree I think that the nplural=2, n!=1 would be the best way to work with Aymara, I’ll be using the optional plural forms when necessary and in case that there is a problem I’ll report it but I highly doubt it.

I’ll mark this ticket as solved now, you can you update the information when you can.

Thank you

Pedro J. García Zea

I´m a bit disagree.
in aymara plural or pluralization is not optional
if optional: the phrase "2 uta" will be similar to "2 utanaka", but the first means 2 houses and the second to groups of houses

pluralization in aymara obeys the following rules

rule example
---------------------- --------------------------------------
noun + naka, utanaka = houses

number + noun, 2 uta or pa uta = 2 houses

in case of own names

noun + noun, cota-cota it refers a town in my city called "lakes",
noun + noun, auki-auki it refers a dance called "old-mans"
(aparently cotanaka or aukinaka seems too rude for a name).

finally like any other language there are words that cannot be pluralized like sand or sugar

i can't understand the formula nplural=2, n!=1, but taking this rules in account, could any one help me to build the plural formula for aymara?

> i can't understand the formula nplural=2, n!=1

This means "The language has one singular and one plural form. The plurall form is used when the number does not equal 1."

This is the same as it is in english:
0 cows
1 cow
2 cows
3 cows
...

Is that how it is in Aymara? Or are there more plural forms, depending on the number? I don't have an example for that because I don't speak any of these languages. But there is an example from Polish in the gettext manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Plural-forms

Henning

thank you very much for this explanation,
I suppose, in the case of phrases of type number + noun, for example 1
house, 0 houses, etc.
plural form for aymara could be nplural=1, n==n, because puting a number
before a noun is indeed one of the plural forms of aymara.
for example 0 uta, 1 uta, 2 uta, etc. (uta = house)

The "s" used by english is equivalent to "naka" in aymara but is only used
when there isn't a number especifically in the phrase.

for example

i´m worried about my houses

translates as

utanakajax llakista

Favio

2009/2/27 Henning Eggers <email address hidden>

> Question #60096 on Launchpad Translations changed:
> https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+question/60096
>
> Henning Eggers posted a new comment:
> > i can't understand the formula nplural=2, n!=1
>
> This means "The language has one singular and one plural form. The
> plurall form is used when the number does not equal 1."
>
> This is the same as it is in english:
> 0 cows
> 1 cow
> 2 cows
> 3 cows
> ...
>
> Is that how it is in Aymara? Or are there more plural forms, depending
> on the number? I don't have an example for that because I don't speak
> any of these languages. But there is an example from Polish in the
> gettext manual:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Plural-forms
>
> Henning
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are a direct
> subscriber of the question.
>

Hello Favio I'm glad to see more Aymara speaking people willing to collaborate here, sorry for not replying before but I couldn't read my mail during these days.

Well the “optional” plural I was talking about was mentioned in this book: http://www.ilcanet.org/publicaciones/pdf_compendio.htmlhttp://www.ilcanet.org/publicaciones/pdf_compendio.html chapter 6 page 112, but I could agree that maybe “optional” isn't the right word but instead it could be said “contextual”, but I think that at the end we are talking about the same thing that when constructing a sentence in Aymara and you mention more than one objects you can say: “object -naka” or “number + object”, and, as you said, and the book also says the same it would be criticized to say: “number + object -naka” as sometimes radio hosts in the rush say. Of course there are other cases like when talking about grains where they are already plural so the ending naka isn't correct, or the names like Cota Cota you mentioned but that won't be applied in the software or if they appear won't be automatically generated and the translator will be able to input the right form.

Nevertheless, the formula doesn't has to do with it, for what I understand the people at Lauchpad, asks us to tell them how many different endings will appear while counting objects depending on the number of them. Specifically I can give you and example where you need that, is when you right click over a directory and select 'Proprieties' in Ubuntu a window will open and it will say “Content: ### elements, ### MiB total” so the concern here is that some languages won't say directly “element” when there is only one element in the directory and “elements” when there are more than one or zero instead. Some languages like Polish change the ending also if there is 1 object, but if there are 2,3,4 objects, 5-21 objects, 22-24 objects, 25-31 objects too. In this case in Aymara we can use only one plural as you said, but my concern is that not all the time the software will mention the number before, sometimes it will refer to objects as “the object” and “the objects” in that case we do need the option to be able to introduce the “-naka” ending. So what we were talking with Henning is that it would be a good thing to have that option, so in the entries where the number is mentioned the program will ask two times always; in those cases we'll type the same thing for both, but when there is an entry where the number isn't specified but there is a distinction between one object and more objects in those cases we will add the -naka, or the verb -p- suffix, the double noun, or any other contextual pluralization used in Aymara when necessary. I don't think that we'll need to use more than two options at the same time, but if that occurs we can report it with a new ticket.

Pedro

P.S. sorry the address was mistyped it is: http://www.ilcanet.org/publicaciones/pdf_compendio.html