Thread:Talk:CLDR/Difference between CLDR plural rules and MediaWiki plural rules

CLDR plural rules define different sets of decimal numbers according to the differences in grammar which occur in a sentence which includes those numbers - see Language Plural Rules on CLDR. These rules do not appear to cover the situation where a decimal number does not appear in a sentence.

In MediaWiki there are a handful of sentences where the PLURAL magic word is used but no number appears in the sentence. In these sentences there is a subject or object which can be either singular or plural and PLURAL is used to enable correct grammatical sentences where verbs, pronouns, etc differ according to the (unstated) number of items discussed. Some examples are:

Potentially there are grammar changes triggered here which are different from the grammar rules triggered by changes in decimal numbers. For example: I know these cases should be rare, and it may be that in practice there are no languages where the CLDR rules do not cover all the uses of PLURAL in MediaWiki as well, but potentially there could be languages affected by this difference in how PLURAL is used on MediaWiki and how it is defined on CLDR. Does anyone know of any languages affected by this?
 * the form of a collective noun (referring to 'more than one') may be different to the form used with a specific number, for example in "the 11 following things" and "the following things" the form for "things" may differ.
 * verb or pronoun forms used may be different for singular and collective plurals, but not different when the number is included in the sentence.

I think that this is not really an issue that necessarily needs to be raised at CLDR, although I am sure they would be interested to learn about how MediaWiki uses PLURAL in sentences that do not include a decimal number. However, what it may mean is that there may be rare cases where translatewiki.net will need to define more number sets for a language than there are in CLDR.