What is difference between MonthGenitiveNames and MonthNames? Why there is blank as month?

Question

I'm confused about MonthGenitiveNames and MonthNames. There are month names as values of both, so what is the difference between MonthGenitiveNames and MonthNames.

Also why is there "blank" for a month? If you look at values of both, there are blank values. What is the reason for the blank in Month names?

Amerson

Answer 1

Genitive names exist because some languages use a different case of nouns to express dates (genitive instead of nominative).

E.g. in Polish nominative for January is "styczeń" but to express a date 2 January you need to use genitive "2 stycznia".

Lofty

Do you mean genitive means culture specific names? and why there is one blank in names? – Amerson

Genitive is a different form of noun. It doesn't occur in all languages. It's like "of" in English, e.g. "of January". I'm not sure about blanks. – Lofty

Answer 2

Michael Kaplan has written a bunch about genetive (see http://www.siao2.com/2010/09/09/10059644.aspx and http://www.siao2.com/2012/01/05/10253370.aspx) so I won't rehash that. In short MonthNames are used in contexts where there is no day and GenitiveMonthNames are used in contexts where there is a day. The actual case may or may not be Genitive (it is so named because the first cases where this was important to distinguish did have a genitive case distinction).

In addition to being used for the Gregorian calendar, the MonthNames and GenitiveMonthNames properties are used for calendars other than Gregorian. When such a calendar system has 13 months, there will not be a blank for the 13th month. It will always be blank for Gregorian since there is no 13th month in the Gregorian system.

Klepht

The second paragraph is not correct. Genitive is a grammar category and has nothing to do with the type of calendar you use. For example, in Polish you would use the same grammatical forms taking about both Gregorian and Julisn systems. – Lofty

@Lofty I believe the paragraph is correct. It makes no claims about Genitive being a calendrical category. MonthNames and GenitiveMonthNames are properties of the DateTimeFormatInfo. The first sentence simply makes the claim that these properties apply not only to Gregorian but to other calendar systems as well. The rest establishes the need for each of these properties to have 13 items, thus answering his question as to why there is a blank in the Gregorian calendar. – Klepht

Maybe you could say "The MonthNames and GenitiveMonthNames are also used for calendars other than Gregorian" to make it more clear. – Lofty

Okay, I modified to clarify. – Klepht

Answer 3

Link : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.monthgenitivenames.aspx:

For example, a date in the Russian (Russia), "ru-RU", culture, consists of the day number and the genitive month name.

Baillargeon

Do you mean genitive means culture specific names? and why there is blank in names? – Amerson

@HareshAmbaliya - no, both MonthNames and MonthGenitiveNames will return culture specific names - it's just that in some cultures, there's more than one form of month name - which one to use depends on the structure of the sentence that you're placing the word into. – Depressant