Inconsistencies in capitalization for day and month names

[debanne]

It seems there are inconsistencies in the intended usage context of the :abbr_day_names, :abbr_month_names, :day_names and :month_names entries across the different locale files. It isn’t clear whether these entries are meant to be used within a sentence or not.

This has led to the assumption—for the :cs locale—that they should be used as column headings (see bc0a11f) and therefore capitalized, which is incorrect (see https://cs.wikibooks.org/wiki/Čeština/Typografie_interpunkčních_znamének_a_jiných_znaků).

It would be helpful to have a rule in the README or at least a confirmation here specifying whether these four entries are typically used for dates embedded in sentences or not.

By confirming the entries are meants to be used within a sentence, developers could apply uppercase when needed (for columns, for example) and ensure correct date formatting—e.g. in Czech—when combining multiple entries such as the weekday name followed by the month name.

[sunny]

I would lean towards clarifying that the within-a-sentence version should prevail since that is the most common use of representing dates.

One way to clarify this would be to have new entries that are always capitalized. While it would help with the inconsistencies and future translations, the date formatting tooling based on Ruby’s % variables wouldn’t include any way to use these unless we introduce new variables or ways to access them.

[pama]

It's a complex topic.

We trust the provided translations are correct, since we can't know every language.

It's also hard to predict how date names will be used, inside a sentence or as headings, and that depends on language rules. For example, the 1990 Portuguese orthographic agreement changed month names from capitalized to lowercase, but if a month name appears at the beginning of a sentence, it should still be capitalized. There are always exceptions to language rules.

Rails localizations aren't context-aware. The rails-i18n gem simply provides translations for strings generated automatically by the Rails APIs. While the I18n API supports pluralization and other features, these translations don't consider for things like grammatical gender or plural forms. It's up to the developer to anticipate and handle those cases. It’s a minimalistic approach and should be seen as a starting point, not a complete solution.

These kinds of details (capitalization, gender, and so on) are hard to document. We'd end up writing a grammar book for each language.

[sunny]

If we wanted to apply a single logic, the Ruby documentation mentions that %B and %b month names are “capitalized”.

Would introducing new variables such as %_B and %_b for example (or other available letters) make sense to allow developers to decide which makes more sense in their case?

[pama]

Someone could create a gem that works with rails-i18n to support that, but it's usually easier / simpler to just change the YAML date keys in the app to match what's needed. IMHO.