Toch weer antwoord: RE: Antwoord: SqueakInternationalization(vo
orheen: Re: AW: AW: -- Whats this 'AW:' mean?)
Edmund Ronald
eronald at rome.polytechnique.fr
Wed Feb 6 02:05:57 UTC 2002
Hmmm, the one thing an english-speaker needs to know about nihongo is that
nihongo is reverse polish while english is more like infix. This solves a
lot of the syntactic difficulties one may have with a particle-based
grammar. After that, there are serious fundamental semantic issues - In
particular, I seem to see meanings jump between "as", "in order to",
"because" etc. whenever I attempt to read japanese texts - cause and
effect are not clearly separated.
Edmund
On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Ohshima, Yoshiki wrote:
> 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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