word’s gender (in this example, feminine), its position and role
in the sentence, and whether the ending is “hard” or “soft.”
Rather than trying to arrive at the form by lexical analysis, it
is clearly more efficient to have a stored list, especially if the
number of words is limited as are month names (no more than
13, depending on the calendar).
Genitive case information has long been a part of Windows itself; you can read the genitive forms directly using
the Win32 API GetCalendarInfo with the appropriate manifest
(Figure 5). However, in .NET 1.1, the information is not available although present in the system. You could find the information using the much-missed WinCV.exe, which is no longer
supplied in .NET 2.0 as such, but is accessible as properties of
DateTimeFormatInfo. You can also read the abbreviated forms
(see Figure 2).
After the list of months in Figure 1, you see two date formats. The first one is created by “D” (standard long date) format string; the other by the custom pattern “dd. MMM yyyy".
Both force the use of the genitive case in Czech. However, not
every date display in Czech (or in other similar languages)
requires the genitive case. It depends on the word order of the
expression as well as the rules of the language. For example,
Slovenian also has a complex case system and is closely
related to Czech, but the genitive case is not used for date
formats. Genitive forms exist, however, in dates for Slovak,
Polish, Russian, Belarus, Latvian and Ukrainian. A similar
feature appears in Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish and several
of the Sami cultures, although the case may be other (
partitive, for example) than the genitive. The Windows operating
system was one of the first to implement and make avail-
Figure 1: Existing and new properties of Date TimeFormatInfo. able the genitive/partitive cases for date expressions. Some
well-known operating systems have never made this simple
genitive, and the preceding e before the last letter is dropped. refinement to providing culturally correct formats.
A language with a genitive case may, however, under some These details about dates are important in the real world.
circumstances also allow another case to be used for dates. Figure 3 shows the banner of a well-known Czech newspaper,
Finnish, for example, has both genitive and partitive
cases and has date forms for both. The partitive case
indicates a “part of” or “portion of.” Russian has such
a case, although it is not used for dates and is not one
of the six normally presented to the new student. For
example, if asking for tea, a partitive form of tea is
often used since you are not normally demanding all
the tea in the world but just a very small part.
1, lunisolar calendars follow a solar year but have
lunar months, thus reducing the number of days in
the year. So, about every three or four years, an extra Figure 2: Information not generally accessible in .NET 1.1.
month is added to keep the calendar in some degree
of synchronization with the solar cycle.
As for allowing for 13 months, as shown in Table
July, 2005. In Czech, of July is handled not by the
preposition of but with a genitive case ending added
to the nominal form of the month name. In this par- Figure 3: Examples of genitive case use in Czech newspaper dates.
ticular example, cˇervenec, the ending is e, and the e
preceding the final c is dropped. The result is cˇervence,
as displayed in the third column of month names. The
short form may also be affected, although in the case
of Czech the forms are Roman numerals and remain
unchanged. The rules are further complicated by the Figure 4: Headline in Slovak.
For example, the first format shown in the middle
of Figure 1 translates it into English as the 13th of
