One last post about genitive dates

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/11/12 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/11/12/491274.aspx

About a year ago I talked about "What the %$#! are genitive dates?" and then yesterday and the day before I talked about them again and then again and then again.

Hopefully this will be the last post about them for a little while!

In a comment to that first post, George asked:

I understand your post about the month names. But what about day names? Do any locales have genitive forms for them?

To which I pointed out:

Hi George,

There may be, but it would not apply here since there is no analagous "owned" piece like "the 7th hour of Monday" or something like that. Thus there is not a case where a genitive form for the day name would be needed.

But perhaps somebody who speaks one of these languages could say for sure whether there is a genitive form for day names?

And not too long after, Igor Tandetnik tried to answer the question:

There is indeed a genitive form of day names in Russian. In fact, there is a genitive form of almost every noun, along with nominative, dative, accusative, instrumental and prepositional. Exceptions are certain nouns borrowed from other languages, that only have one form.

GetLocaleInfo(LOCALE_SDAYNAMEx) provides the nominative form for day names (this is the base form, the one listed in dictionaries and such). If you use a date by itself, as in "Monday, January 3", this is the form you need. But if the date is used as part of a sentence, you may need other forms. E.g. in "until Monday, January 3" one would use genitive, "on Monday, January 3" requires accusative, to say "between Monday, January 3 and Saturday, January 8" you need instrumental.

Although it is not entirely clear to me from the above whether the genitive form would in fact be used here for the day as well as the month; I had though (perhaps incorrectly) that it would require something within the day such as "the 7th hour of Tuesday". But is it the case that some of the strigs given above that include a day name would require the genitive form of the day name?

The problem is complicated a bit more by a few facts:

1. If I am correct about the use of genitive day names, then Windows currently has no way to support format strings that would use the genitive day names since there is no NLS function that will mix date and time tokens; if I am wrong then it is easily possible.
2. The .NET Framework's formatting and pasrsing allow the mixing of date and time values and it is posible to create a format string where a genitive day name might be expected (but which we do not currently use anything but the one nominative form we have).

So, in the interests of looking at features in future versions, what kind of formatted strings would include a day name where the genitive form of the day's name would be expected?

(I promise this will be my last post about genitive dates for a while!)

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# Igor Tandetnik on 12 Nov 2005 9:45 AM:

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