Take advantage of inflection inside ICU

[richgillam]

Many ICU APIs produce structured output (sentences or phrases) rather than single phrases. Many of these not only may need to inflect in interesting ways to support being inserted into a message, but have individual components that affect each others' inflections. Examples include:

• Formatted dates
• Date ranges
• Spelled-out numbers
• Dimensioned numbers
• Lists
• Person names
• Locale names

It'd be nice if we could use the new inflection capability to improve and simplify the formatting algorithms for these things.

[grhoten]

The current inflection code supports lists with its own API. It adds functionality that is currently unavailable in ICU, and it would be hard to squeeze into ICU.

The spelled out numbers are handled with ICU's RBNF, but the inflection code allows you to add context to choose the correct RBNF rule for quantities more smoothly. Though I can see the inflection code being changed to handle such number pronunciation even more seamlessly.

There is some overlap and dependencies between ICU and the current Morphuntion code around this topic.