Upgrade StorageCorrections for el-GR (Greek) citation styles
I am in the process of finalizing a Greek book and I am starting this discussion to point out a few errors regarding Greek localization. I am using Chicago 16th edition (author-date), but probably these comments might apply to other styles.
1. Multiple citation delimiter.
The default delimiter for multiple citations is the semi-colon, e.g.: (Writer1 2001; Writer2 2002; Writer3 2003).
However, in Greek the semi-colon symbol is used as a question mark, so effectively for a Greek reader that seems like reading: (Writer1 2001? Writer2 2002? Writer3 2003).
The corresponding Greek symbol for a semi-colon is the "upper dot" or "ano teleia". The keyboard code for it is U+0387 and it looks like "·" (Not to be mistaken for the middle dot "·" with code U+00B7. For comparison, here they are side by side: ··).
For personal use, I am in the process of making a variation of the style and I have tentatively modified the csl at the relevant point to look as:
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="· ">
Is that approach valid from a coding perspective?
In any case, shouldn't that be taken into account at the locales level, if possible, or maybe at the offi
2. The el-GR locales have an error, or omission, for ordinals:
<!-- ORDINALS -->
<term name="ordinal">ος</term>
That definition is used to denote an edition (1st, 2nd, etc).
However, the Greek word for "Edition" is " Έκδοση" and it is a feminine noun. Since there is an noun-adjective agreement in Greek (both in gender and in number), the ordinal (which is essentially an adjective) must be feminine to match "Edition" (Έκδοση). In that case, the ordinal for a first edition should not read as "1ος" (πρώτος) but as "1η" (πρώτη), which is the feminine ending for the the ordinal "first".
This comment is valid for the "edition" field, which in Greek is a feminine noun. If the ordinal is used for other fields as well, then their gender must be taken into account: "ος" for masculine, "η" for feminine and "ο" for neutral, all in the singular.
I don't know if long ordinals are used similarly in some other style, or for some other field, but if yes, they should also be amended to reflect the gender (and possibly number) of that field name in Greek.
3. Missing translations:
Book review articles are missing translations:
a. "Review of" is entirely missing its translation. A couple of reasonable ones could be "Βιβλιοκριτική στο" or "Βιβλιοκριτική του".
b. The reviewed "by" is untranslated:
<term name="reviewed-author" form="verb">by</term>
A reasonable translation would be "από". It would be even more precise to use "από τον" or "από την" to distinguish between a male and a female reviewer, respectively. But now I am probably nitpicking!
1. Multiple citation delimiter.
The default delimiter for multiple citations is the semi-colon, e.g.: (Writer1 2001; Writer2 2002; Writer3 2003).
However, in Greek the semi-colon symbol is used as a question mark, so effectively for a Greek reader that seems like reading: (Writer1 2001? Writer2 2002? Writer3 2003).
The corresponding Greek symbol for a semi-colon is the "upper dot" or "ano teleia". The keyboard code for it is U+0387 and it looks like "·" (Not to be mistaken for the middle dot "·" with code U+00B7. For comparison, here they are side by side: ··).
For personal use, I am in the process of making a variation of the style and I have tentatively modified the csl at the relevant point to look as:
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="· ">
Is that approach valid from a coding perspective?
In any case, shouldn't that be taken into account at the locales level, if possible, or maybe at the offi
2. The el-GR locales have an error, or omission, for ordinals:
<!-- ORDINALS -->
<term name="ordinal">ος</term>
That definition is used to denote an edition (1st, 2nd, etc).
However, the Greek word for "Edition" is " Έκδοση" and it is a feminine noun. Since there is an noun-adjective agreement in Greek (both in gender and in number), the ordinal (which is essentially an adjective) must be feminine to match "Edition" (Έκδοση). In that case, the ordinal for a first edition should not read as "1ος" (πρώτος) but as "1η" (πρώτη), which is the feminine ending for the the ordinal "first".
This comment is valid for the "edition" field, which in Greek is a feminine noun. If the ordinal is used for other fields as well, then their gender must be taken into account: "ος" for masculine, "η" for feminine and "ο" for neutral, all in the singular.
I don't know if long ordinals are used similarly in some other style, or for some other field, but if yes, they should also be amended to reflect the gender (and possibly number) of that field name in Greek.
3. Missing translations:
Book review articles are missing translations:
a. "Review of" is entirely missing its translation. A couple of reasonable ones could be "Βιβλιοκριτική στο" or "Βιβλιοκριτική του".
b. The reviewed "by" is untranslated:
<term name="reviewed-author" form="verb">by</term>
A reasonable translation would be "από". It would be even more precise to use "από τον" or "από την" to distinguish between a male and a female reviewer, respectively. But now I am probably nitpicking!
2. CSL _can_ however, handle ordinals of different genders. See the French locale, for example, on how to define a term as feminine (or masculine):
https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/master/locales-fr-FR.xml#L33
and how to define ordinals of different genders:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/master/locales-fr-FR.xml#L76
We'd be happy to accept a pull request for the Greek locale that implements this:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
About 2 & 3: I will read about how we make pull requests and make the appropriate pull requests as soon as I can.
Actually, there is also the issue of the numerals for same-author same-year citations. I.e., while in Latin-alphabet languages it is perfectly alright to note same-year publications as (Author1 1990a; 1990b; Author2 1991a; 1991b; 1991c), In Greek we use the Greek-letter numerals, which would have the list read as (Author1 1990α; 1990β; Author2 1991α; 1991β; 1991γ).
Maybe there are other modifications I haven't thought of yet.
Note: I only understand that this numbering is turned on/off by the disambiguate-add-year-suffix true/false declaration. However, I found no specification for it as a scheme (i.e., a, b, c, d,..., y, z, aa, ab, ac, ad,...) in styles or locales. So am I correct to assume that it is hard-coded into Zotero?
Could we select, for instance, Greek or Latin numerals instead?
The pull request is https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/pull/117
This corrected style is good for my personal use. If you think that it bears sufficient changes to upload to the repository, I would be happy to do it.
As a side note and talking as a non-linguist, I suppose that the csl specification, the various citation styles, and Zotero itself, were probably developed with English as a working language, with other languages being considered along the way. Although the seamlessness so far is quite impressive, at least for Greek, it still leaves things to be desired for professional quality bibliographies.
Some differences in grammar, syntax and punctuation marks, cannot be taken into account by existing styles. E.g. modern Greek nouns, articles, adjectives and names have four cases and three genders, the endings of which are generally different. Clearly a framework built on English may not entirely be suitable for Greek.
Therefore, I believe that a Greek version of the Chicago style (or some other) is not so much a quirk of some author, but a linguistic necessity, particularly when the language requirements are not covered by the locales.