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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

This is a good article, though as someone who prefers references/tables to prose for technical topics, the real find for me was the link out to the Unicode CLDR project (which sadly contains a LOT of broken links right now due to a data migration effort but I'll bookmark it & hopefully it'll be navigable in future).

As someone with a Polish partner, who also fluently speaks my own weird minority local language (Irish), I'm more than well aware of pluralisation pitfalls; Irish may have one of the most complex rulesets, so much so that I'm almost certain it isn't represented in CDLR (possibly can't be). But I see the plural pitfall brought up in so many of these guide - I've always been curious about other unexpected/unintuitive pitfalls across languages out there. Would love if there was a simple reference of the most interesting (starting with plurals I guess).

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Remarkable in similar situation, Irish + Polish learnt because of wife and extended family. Found when it comes i18n with the present codebase, I have inherited, it needs a lot of work, but it was immensely helpful to have two backgrounds in particular tricky languages, relative to English.

In quickly scoping out what needs to be worked, and where the inherited setup clearly falls short. Don't think knowing a great deal about other languages is necessary though for the same effect, just enough to smell something might be a bit trickier, like know say the case system in X language shows up in different ways, verb + pronoun order is not predefined.

The CLDR plural rules for Irish are here https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/42/supplemental/language... Not quite as complex as the ones for Breton https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/42/supplemental/language... but of course they might be wrong.

Both of these only cover case changes for the object being counted: cases are pretty common across non-English languages so this is simple enough on its own.

The main difference I see in Breton is the rules for 1-9 follow through for double-digits n1-n9 - I would've suspected this to be true for Irish but I just speak it, don't study it, so confidence in my grammatical knowledge is low.

Irish definitely doesn't have the exceptions for 71-79 & 91-99; this smells like French influence.

The main thing missing from both of these though is modifications to the actual words for numerals: they kind of get away with it by sticking to digits, but I'm not sure if that's always the case in the translated output of i18n libraries referencing this. If they're ever outputting words in place of numerical digits then these are both very incomplete.

Irish then also has an entirely different way of counting persons which isn't included.

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