Issues with dates in languages that use grammatical cases?

ashune
Zotero uses the wrong grammatical case for dates in Croatian, which is one of the many languages that use grammatical cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case).

For Croatian (hr), the month in dates should be in genitive, but Zotero always uses nominative when you insert the reference list into Microsoft Word. For example, 5 July 2024 should be "5. srpnja 2024.", but Zotero would insert "5. srpanj 2024."

On the other hand, when the date consists only of a month and year (without the day, e.g. July 2024), Zotero is correct in using nominative ("srpanj 2024.").

Not sure how this works in other languages that use grammatical cases, and if it works correctly in Zotero for those.

Is there a way to fix this? Because currently we have to manually correct all the dates, which can be really annoying for documents with hundreds of references.
  • adamsmith
    (This is CSL not Zotero in this case). I don't think there's a fix for this, I'm afraid, and it's not an easy problem to solve in a multilingual environment, I'm afraid.
  • ashune
    Would it be an acceptable solution to change the month translations to be in genitive? Per my own experience (I don't have raw data to support this though, only subjective experience), there's far more dates in a day-month-year format (which uses months in genitive) than only month-year (without the day, which would use the currently only supported nominative form). This might reduce the number of dates that need to be fixed.
  • adamsmith
    I think it's plausible that just month/year is less common, yes. @bwiernik -- thoughts on this?
  • bwiernik
    I think that’s the case. The major style that used to have Year, Month citations was APA, and they do full date citations now.

    @adamsmith For a more complete future solution, what do you think about allowing locales to specify by-month translations for different date forms (while retaining the current system as fall-back, like we do for eg, verb-short falling back to verb)?
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