Messieurs,

This would be a hard change to make in the etoy system for languages where the word order of the possessive is opposite to English, because the order of the tiles themselves would have to be different for it to read correctly, which would require significant structural changes rather than simple wording substitutions.

We could handle localizing the possessive wording on the tiles without much difficulty in languages where the pattern:

<object-name> <possessive-token> <property-name>

is used for possessives, thus:

English: John's x German: Johns x Japanese: John-no x

but we would need reversed tile order for:

French: (l') x de John Kiswahili: x ya John

So there would unfortunately seem to be no easy solution for these -- sorry!

But perhaps at least *removing* the "'s" suffixes for possessive tiles in languages other than English would improve matters slightly, e.g. "John x" rather than "John's x".

... not really French, but at least not English, and at least somewhat language-neutral?? ;-)

Cheers,

-- Scott

At 12:15 PM +0000 4/1/03, philippe@capcod.com wrote:

Bonjour M Dreyfuss,

J'ai essay? de votre version francaise de Squeak et j'en suis tr?s satisfait. Merci pour le travail effectu? qui d?passe largement le cadre de celui que j'avais commenc?, ? savoir la traduction de #addFrenchVocabulary.

Mais peut-etre pouvons nous aller plus loin en supprimant les 's du genitif, car ils sont genants pour les petits francais...

Avez-vous cherch? dans ce sens ?

Cordialement,

Philippe Nougaillon