The english language is very simple when it comes to plurals:
You have 0 elephants, 1 elephant, or 2+ elephants.
So basically you have 2 different forms: one singular and one plural.
But for some other languages this is quite a bit more difficult. Let’s take the Bosnian language as another example:
You have [1/21/31] slon, [2/3/4] slona, [0/5/6] slonova and [7/8/9/11] ...
The platform for JowettTalk has 15 sets of rules to help translators.
Rule #0 I like this -simples.
Families: Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese), Persian, Turkic/Altaic (Turkish), Thai, Lao
1 - everything: 0, 1, 2, ...
Rule #1 More difficult...
Families: Germanic (Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Frisian, German, Norwegian, Swedish), Finno-Ugric (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian), Language isolate (Basque), Latin/Greek (Greek), Semitic (Hebrew), Romanic (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan)
1 - 1
2 - everything else: 0, 2, 3, ...
Rule #7 Weird....
Families: Slavic (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian)
1 - ends in 1, excluding 11: 1, 21, 31, ... 101, 121, ...
2 - ends in 2-4, excluding 12-14: 2, 3, 4, 22, 23, 24, 32, ...
3 - everything else: 0, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26,
Rule #4 So this is why Scots have a problem with money....
Families: Celtic (Scottish Gaelic)
1 - is 1 or 11: 1, 11
2 - is 2 or 12: 2, 12
3 - others between 3 and 19: 3, 4, ... 10, 13, ... 18, 19
4 - everything else: 0, 20, 21, ...
I guess this came about because you have 20 fingers and toes.....
Refer to
https://area51.phpbb.com/docs/dev/3.1.x ... urals.html