[L20n] Conditional Maqaf

[Yaron Shahrabani]

Hi guys!

I participated in the last Mozilla l10n hackathon in Paris and had a little
chat with Stas (It was awesome to meet you!), and I wanted to ask if
there's an option to have conditional characters added to the translation
automatically.

A further explanation:
In Hebrew we join certain usage prefix to the word with a single letter, so
"the cat" would become HAkhatul (החתול while khatul is cat - חתול), same
goes for "in", so in an airplane would become "HAmatos" (המטוס while matos
is an airplane - מטוס).

The problem starts when we want to join numbers or words from a different
script to these prepositions, let's say "in Mozilla" would become
"BE-Mozilla" or "in 3 places" would become "BE-3 mekomot" (ב־3 מקומות)

In MediaWiki there's a function that handles that, this is the link:
https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/LanguageHe_8php_source.html

What I wanted to ask is if there's a conditonal function that will check
the first character after a perposition and will decide whether we should
put a Maqaf in there or not.

To summarize:
Currently we add the Maqaf manually so that even if the parameter is
replaced with a Hebrew word there will be a Maqaf separating the
preposition from the subject.

These are the 3 different cases (with random prepositions, there are more -
משה וכלב):
מ־3 מקומות (from 3 places).
ב־Firefox‏ (In Firefox).
ובית (and home).

And of course some linguistic background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefixes_in_Hebrew

Thanks guys!
Yaron Shahrabani

<DevOps - Hebrew translator>