I saw a very interesting program form BBC television (?) about this subject:

In Britain lives a mental handicaped person who likes it to learn languages,
around 200 now.
This research instutute hires him to help them with their language research
and pay him salary.

They check his fluency in languages and the way he reacts on deliberate
faults in sentences.
He is great in that.  
They also construct new languages and teach these to him, and the do the
same research of breaking the rules of the gramar, again he is great in it.

In other conceptual areas he still is handicaped: they showed the example
were  a person did hide a candy under a towel when another child was there
too. Then they sent that child away and hided the obcandy on another place.
Then they asked him where the child would look, when it came back in the
room. On the new place he said...

So handling sets of words and handling the rules around it is a proces on
its own, giving it different meanings depending of the place in the
sentence.. On top of that comes the context of meanings, common sense etc.
 




-----Original Message-----
From: Hannes Hirzel [mailto:hirzel at spw.unizh.ch]
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 10:58 AM
To: Ohshima, Yoshiki
Cc: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: RE: Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: Squeak
Internationalization (vo orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)




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