Re: masdar or fi3l amr

[Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org>]

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Salam,

Hmm, nice passionate debate ;-)

Anyway, I have no specific preference but here's what I think.

* When I first met a computer, the GUI was in French... In that language, it 
happens that all the actions are in the _infinitive_ form.

* When I first seen an English interface, I was already biased. In that 
language, as you know, it happens that the imperative and infinitive forms 
are not distinguishable. So, for me, English people was using infinitive too 
:-)

* When I finally met an Arabic interface, the interfaces were mainly using 
masdars (infinitive). So for me, nothing changed really.

So, to summarize, I got early to use infinitive (masdars) in interfaces. 
However, recently, I started to use Imperative forms in translations and I 
saw imperative forms in GUIs. And I must say that it is not bad at all and 
one can really get used to it quickly.

What I think therefore is that moving to imperative forms should not be an 
issue in itself. Given some time for people to get used to it, it should 
become natural. What I want to understand is why, in the first place, we 
should we prefer imperative form ? ie. Is there any references that talk 
about this issue ? Are there any links out there that speak about this 
specific issue (for ex: In English GUIs, strings are in imperative forms and 
not infinitive etc).

Again, I do not prefer any solution really. I just want to have a rationale 
for us to use something rather than the other. I may be biased, but look, the 
French (and the Spanish if I'm not mistaken) use infinitive forms in their 
GUIs (not only the translated ones), so why should _we_ use imperative forms 
?

Just wanting to understand and make a constructive debate,

Salam,

- -- 
Youcef R. Rahal
Arabeyes.org
http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal
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