Support parsing dates in a few African languages

[rlskoeser]

Based on conversation with @Buzaabah

There are some historical African calendars in specific regions, but it would be more useful as a first step to support parsing contemporary dates in a few African languages, supporting day and month names in the target language and script.

We propose targeting these languages initially:

• Kinyarwanda - rw
• Ganda - lg
• Tigrinya - ti - written in Geʽez script

Some variant of each of these seems to be present in the python locale data already; let's start with that.

tasks

• generate localized dates in each of these languages; use each month and weekday at least once. @Buzaabah will review
• test parsing dates in these calendars with existing tools (python datetime, Babel) to determine how much of a gap there is
• start building out an undate parser using localized month/day names and abbreviations with these languages included

[rlskoeser]

@Buzaabah I have finally circled back to this!

I made a Marimo notebook to test out built in African language support for dates in the built-in python datetime and locale and test out the Babel package. I was able to publish my notebook online, so you can view a runnable version here: Marimo notebook: African Language dates

Here are my conclusions:

• built-in python datetime + locale is insufficient here; African locale data not was not installed on my machine, and python assumes only one locale is active at a time
• Babel is great for formatting locale-specific dates and for access to names for months, days, etc. However, it seems to be more limited when parsing dates (requires knowing the format and locale; I couldn't get it to work with non-numeric dates).

I think this means there is a gap here that undate can help fill.

@Buzaabah would you review the notebook and check the formatted dates and the day and month names generated by Babel for the three languages we chose? And let me know if you'd like to see any other variations or additional information.

If the names generated by Babel look good to you, then I can start using that to develop a multilingual date parser that includes the variant forms of months and days for these three languages.