Version: 0.9.0 (using KDE 3.5.9) Installed from: SuSE RPMs The "articles" and "conjugation" fields in the Language Properties dialog are far too restrictive, and make too many assumptions about the language. For example, both fieldsets assume that the language has male, female, and neuter genders. Not every language has three genders. Some have more, and some have fewer. Even those languages with exactly three genders do not always classify them as male, female, and neuter. Please allow the user to specify the number of genders in the language and their names. Likewise, the article fieldset divides the articles into definite and indefinite, but not every language has these two types of articles. Some have more, and some have fewer. (Even English has a third type, the partitive.) Please allow the user to specify the number of articles in the language and their names. Finally, the conjugation fieldset categorizes pronouns by person, number, and gender (but only for the third person). However, not all languages categorize their pronouns this way. For example, some have separate pronouns for inclusive and exclusive first-person plural, some do not have separate pronouns for genders, some make an additional distinction between formal and informal, and some distinguish between gender not just in the third person but also in the first and/or second. Since the number of dimensions (e.g., person, gender, formality) is not fixed across all languages, please either allow the user to specify the number of dimensions and their names, or simplify the system such that there is a single dimension. (In the latter solution, you would simply have a two-column table headed "Pronoun type" and "Pronoun name", where the user might specify as the pronoun type a compound label such as "2nd person plural formal".)
While I think you are correct -- we need to rethink the language definition totally -- this is not actually a bug. It's a wish for new features, so I'm moving it to the wishlist.
I second this. I just tried creating a conjugation exercise for my children in Arabic and noticed there is no way I can input forms of 2nd person singular feminine or 2nd person plural feminine, which are consistently different from the corresponding masculines. A student of Finnish would be limited in his noun declension exercises to nominative, accusative, genitive and ablative, having to leave aside partitive, essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, allative, comitative, abessive and instructive, since the number of fields is fixed. A student of Hungarian or Veps would need even more case forms...