Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: Squeak Internationalization (vo orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)

Ohshima, Yoshiki Yoshiki.Ohshima at disney.com
Tue Feb 5 03:41:02 UTC 2002


  Hello,

> > So absorbing words from elsewhere is one of the reasons that English 
> > thrives (including its very forgiving grammar (or almost lack of one )
> 
> Actually this is not correct - many non-mother-tongue user of English are
> aware of this. What you mean is that in English the morphology is not very
> complex, i.e. speaking of inflection and derivation. However strictly
> speaking this statement is not precise.

  I read an article by Issac Asimov stating similar thing
(English is ...).  But, after learning Japanese (:-), I have
to say Japanese language has more forgiving grammar and has
absorbed words from elsewhere.

  I believe that many word in core-Japanese (proto-Japanese)
vocabulary can be tracked down to the days when they only
had "onomatope'e" words.  "Pica" in Picachu is a common way
to imitate the sound of lightening, while "hika(ru)" is the
verb that means "light".  "Chu" is a textual representation
of the voice of a mouse, something like "squeak" in English.

  Regarding the "isolating", "agglutinating", or
"inflecting" language taxonomy, the definition of "words",
"prefixes", or "suffixes" pretty much depend on westerners'
point of view; Japanese is often categorized as an
agglutinating language, but some say it doesn't quite fit.
(Although, I think that Japanese language has many common
aspects with Finnish or Hungarian. (I believe.))

> This transferred to Squeak and etoys specifically: 
> The keywords are symbols which have a specific meaning, 
> they can have an icon or an English, Frisian, French, German,
> Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanisch or Swedisch tag on it. (I
> tried not to forget any mother tongue of Sqeuak list contributors I'm
> aware of). 
> It is possible to create a powerful language this way respecting the
> importance of word order (a part of syntax).

  It would be nice if the resulting "sentense" can be
readable/understandable as a natural language sentense.
Looking at Abe-san's Japanese vocabulary for eToys, it is
sort of possible to make up an understandable Japanese
sentense with current framework, but it isn't still as
natural as the english version.  It would be great if we can
come up with something.

-- Yoshiki



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