{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} does not display genitive case of month names in English
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	Bugreporter2
	Jan 1 2023, 3:30 PM

Description

Steps to replicate the issue** (include links if applicable):

Use {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}

What happens?**:

Displays January (or February/March/April/May/June/July/August/September/October/November/December) as appropriate. In English, these are the common case forms of the month names.

What should have happened instead?**:

The correct English genitive case of January is January's. Similarly, February is inflected to February's, March to March's, April to April's, etc.

Other information** (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

The incorrect system messages are [[MediaWiki:January-gen]], [[MediaWiki:February-gen]], [[MediaWiki:March-gen]], etc.

Yes, this is very pedantic, but I am right about the grammar, and it's annoying.

Event Timeline

Bugreporter2 created this task.Jan 1 2023, 3:30 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptJan 1 2023, 3:30 PM

The genitive is just a misnomer here. It's supposed to be alternative version of month names to be used in dates. These messages are not used in English.

Pppery closed this task as Declined.Jan 7 2023, 4:30 PM

I think the genitive case is included in Mediawuki for languages like Polish where it's not straightforwardly formed and is important in the grammar.

English also has a genitive case, which is formed by inflecting the {'s} morpheme onto nouns. It's not a misnomer, it's literally what grammarians call it. (Sometimes it's called possessive case).

So the default English values are wrong and should be cjanged.

@Bugreporter2: If those messages are not used in English, what is the specific gain and motivation to change them in English?

Well, {{gender|username}} isn't used in English either to address the user in the second person, but it's included everywhere in the system messages.

Pedantry mostly, 😒, but it might help translators.

If these messages were to be used in Finnish, tammikuu vs. tammikuuta, it would actually be a partitive, not genitive. That's why I said genitive is a misnomer. More accurately it is just another form of months to be used in dates, if needed.

I wouldn't take too much from comparing English, which is an Indo-European language, with Finnish which is Uralic. The two are very different. English is closer to Slavic languages. Grammarians' analysis of the Germanic genitive isn't controversial.

Aklapper added a project: MediaWiki-Parser.Jan 14 2023, 5:21 PM

Bugreporter2 added a project: good first task.Nov 14 2023, 2:57 AM

Contested tasks are not good first tasks.

{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} does not display genitive case of month names in EnglishOpen, LowestPublicBUG REPORTActions

Description

Event Timeline

{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} does not display genitive case of month names in English
Open, LowestPublicBUG REPORT
Actions