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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