Re: masdar or fi3l amr

[Arafat Medini <lumina at silverpen dot de>]

French, german, spanish, japanese, english. 
All of them use  infinitive forms!

it is now 10 pm so I'll go and sleep first ;) But I still have many
things to say hehe ;)

I still think mine is the best :P

yours
Arafat

> 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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