Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: SqueakInternationalization(vo orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)
Ohshima, Yoshiki
Yoshiki.Ohshima at disney.com
Tue Feb 5 17:43:06 UTC 2002
Hello,
> English has the order subject-verb-object (SVO) while Japanese has
> subject-object-verb.
> (See http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Subject+Verb+Object)
The concept of "subject" or "object" are pretty much
westerner's point of view:-) It would be more fair to say,
as in the http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Japanese_language+,
a sentense structure looks like:
TOPIC: PARTICLE: COMMENT
And TOPIC can be sometimes omitted if known and PARTICLE is
sometimes not necessary. (And sometimes people don't say
COMMENT neither:-).)
Like German, and I believe Dutch has similar
characteristic although my knowledge on German is almost
gone, the "case" of the word is denoted by the acompanying
particle (in Japanese, it is a sort of suffix, in German, it
is "der des dem den" thingy.) So the word order in the
sentense is somewhat forgiving.
> Example
>
> | Ellipse's | width |
>
> vs.
>
> | the width | of the Ellipse |
>
>
> Would it be possible that you give some examples (with word by
> word English translation, I don't know Japanese) why it does not sound
> natural in Japanese?
Regarding this "possesive case", the former is just
natural and the current one is fine. The problem occurs
when "increase by" or such things involved.
Ellipse's x increase by 5
looks ok/understandable in English. But in Japanese, the
more natural form would be
Ellipse "no" x "wo" 5 "masu (increase)"
("no" is a particle which denotes that the following word
is a possesion of the preceding word. "wo" is a particle
which denotes the preceding word is the object.
Or, it is possible to say
5 | Ellipse "no" x "wo" "masu (increase)"
However, it is pretty hard to make up a natural sentense
with "5" sitting at the end. The current way is something
like to say:
Ellipse's x "increase by the following number:" 5
This is understandable, but somewhat tricky. Basically the
object, or a building blocks/tile of eToy sometimes have to
be surrounded by another two tiles that are related and
represent a single concept.
One possible way is to allow some "fuzz-words" around the
actual building bloks. But I can see many problems with
this approach...
-- Yoshiki
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