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Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

Russian has singular, plural and paucal (reserved for small numbers: 2-4). Interestingly, zero is plural, not paucal:

  1 kot "1 cat"

  3 kota "3 cats"

but:

  5 kotov "5 cats"

  0 kotov "0 cats"

Also 101 becomes singular again, as on "101 kot".

There are websites that capture these rules for all common languages, to assist localization and translators.

English is

nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);

Russian is much more complex:

nplurals=3; plural=(n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2);

English has the same issue with ordinals. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... then back to 101st, 102nd.

Same in Serbo-Croatian: 1 mačka 2-4 mačke 5+ mačaka 0 mačaka

> Slavic family: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Croatian