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

Hannes Hirzel hirzel at spw.unizh.ch
Tue Feb 5 09:57:44 UTC 2002


On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Ohshima, Yoshiki wrote:

>   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.

I think to make a sentence sound 'natural' word order is important. And
especially the order of subject verb and object in a neutral expression. 

English has the order subject-verb-object (SVO) while Japanese has
subject-object-verb.
(See http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Subject+Verb+Object)

However when looking at etoy probably more important is the constitutent
structure of commands and the structure of associative
(genetive) constructs.

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?


Regards

Hannes Hirzel




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