# Locale files: Use ordinal instead of suffix="." in some date formats

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [January 5, 2014, 9:11pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213 "2014-01-05T21:11:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Nick\_Bart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3bc359/32.png) [@Nick\_Bart](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Nick_Bart)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2014, 9:11pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/1 "2014-01-05T21:11:35Z")

</div>

Date formats in some locales, including Danish, German, Hungarian and  
others, contain dots, as, e.g., Danish “1. Marts 2013”.

CSL locale files specify such date formats as

The number, e.g., “1.”, however is not really a cardinal number with a  
suffix, but rather an ordinal.

If the ordinal suffix is defined as .,  
there usually is no difference in output between using

```
<date-part name="day" suffix=". "/>

```

and

```
<date-part name="day" form="ordinal" suffix=" "/>

```

Only when trying to format date ranges, this difference becomes  
crucial: Both citeproc-js and pandoc-citeproc do not output the  
expected “1.–2. Marts 2013”, but “1–2. Marts 2013”.

(On pandoc-citeproc, see  
[https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/12](https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/12) and  
[https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/18;](https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-citeproc/issues/18;) for two citeproc-js  
tests see [https://gist.github.com/nickbart1980/8271897](https://gist.github.com/nickbart1980/8271897))

It seems the processors are behaving as expected: the first suffix in  
a range is removed (alternatively, you could say only one suffix is  
rendered after the day range) – and it has to be, or else you’d get  
"March 1,–2, 2012" in en-US.

Thus, if all dots must be kept with their numbers, as is the case for  
Danish, German, Hungarian, and other dates, the number format must not  
be defined as number plus suffix “.”, but as ordinal number (with the  
ordinal suffix defined, elsewhere, as “.”).

Thus I’d like to propose the following:

1. in all CSL locale files where ‘.’, and  
where in ‘\<date-part name=“day” …\>’ and ‘\<date-part name=“month”  
…\>’ definitions the ‘suffix=’ element contains a dot, add  
’form=“ordinal”’ or ‘form= “ordinal-leading-zeros”’ (see below) to the  
definition, and remove the dot from the suffix element.

2. add the value “ordinal-leading-zeros” to the form attribute for  
date-parts day and month to enable leading zeros in date formats such  
as “01.03.2013” and “01.–23.03.2013”.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2014, 4:40am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/2 "2014-01-07T04:40:07Z")

</div>

As you’re probably aware, the value “ordinal-leading-zeros” currently  
doesn’t exist in CSL. I’ve read your pandoc tickets and googled a bit,  
and I’m not yet convinced that the periods in dates like "01.03.2013"  
truly represent ordinals suffixes. The entire format also has been  
deprecated (search e.g. for “DIN 5008” in  
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html) ; or see the entry for  
Germany at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\_format\_by\_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country) ), so  
I’m not ready to add this attribute value right now. My opinion can be  
easily swayed if an authoritative source is available, of course.

For all non-numeric dates, I agree that we should remove the suffix  
from the “day” date-part and rely on ordinal suffixes instead for the  
appropriate locales. Nick, can you open a pull request for the  
"locales" repo?

Rintze

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2014, 4:46am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/3 "2014-01-07T04:46:50Z")

</div>

Rintze - you only mean 01.03.2013, right? Because 1.3.2013 is most  
certainly still the standard date format in Germany, no matter what the DIN  
says. And it’s read as “Erster Dritter 2013”, so these are ordinals. Not  
sure about the leading zeros either, though.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2014, 4:56am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/4 "2014-01-07T04:56:39Z")

</div>

So we would need “ordinal” as an additional option for the "month"  
date-part as well?

Rintze

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2014, 5:21am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/5 "2014-01-07T05:21:11Z")

</div>

Ah you’re right. If we’re going that route - yes. I also don’t have strong  
feelings on this, but I think what Nick says makes sense and the only  
reason it hasn’t come up before is that Zotero et al don’t pass on range  
data to the citeprocs, so this will likely become more important once they  
do.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Nick\_Bart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3bc359/32.png) [@Nick\_Bart](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Nick_Bart)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 7:06pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/locale-files-use-ordinal-instead-of-suffix-in-some-date-formats/1213/6 "2014-01-09T19:06:33Z")

</div>

I have issued a pull request for the locale files for cs-CZ, da-DK, de-AT,  
de-CH, de-DE, et-EE, fi-FI, is-IS, nb-NO and nn-NO. To the best of my  
knowledge, all these languages use periods as ordinal indicators, these  
ordinal indicators must not be separated from their numbers, and the format  
for day ranges is “d.-d. monthname yyyy”.

Other languages listed as using periods as ordinal indicators in \<  
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal\_indicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_indicator)\> include Croatian, Faroese,  
Hungarian, Latvian, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, and Turkish.

I have left the locale files for these unchanged for the moment:

hr-HR, sk-SK, sl-SI, and sr-RS have leading zeros in their textual day  
formats, so this will have to wait until CSL allows leading zeros for  
ordinals.

Faroese has no CSL locale file.

hu-HU and lv-LV have a YMD format, and I am not sure how ranges are handled  
here.

pl-PL’s textual day format currently does not contain a period (though  
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\_and\_time\_notation\_in\_Poland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Poland) claims they  
are used “often”).

And in tr-TR, periods seem to be used in the numerical but not the textual  
form (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date\_and\_time\_notation\_in\_Turkey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Turkey)).

If anyone has more specific information on any of these, please let me know.

As to leading zeros for ordinals, both in textual and numerical date  
formats, it seems these are used in many locales, are actually quite  
common, and are also specified by style files:

- Leading zeros are used in the textual day formats of current hr-HR,  
sk-SK, sl-SI, and sr-RS CSL locale files. All these use “.” suffixes that  
should be changed to ordinals.

- Ordinals with leading zeros are more popular than ordinals without in a  
number of locales: A google search for a numerical date on German sites  
reports 9,110,000 results for ‘“01.01.2014” site:de’, compared with 680,000  
results for ‘“1.1.2014” site:de’; a similar search on Norwegian sites  
reports 784,000 dates with leading zeros and 38,500 without; for Finnish  
sites it’s still 252,000 with vs. 673,000 without leading zeros, and for  
Czech sites 593,000 vs. 1,350,000.

- The style guide used for harvard7de.csl (German) uses leading zeros for  
day and month in numerical dates.

Taken together, I would say these are excellent arguments in favour of  
introducing the option of using leading zeros for ordinals in CSL.On 7 January 2014 05:21, Sebastian Karcher \<@Sebastian\_Karcher\>wrote: