Re: Non-english IF?!


14 Dec 1995 07:04:20 GMT

In article s17@newsbf02.news.aol.com, ersatzpogo@aol.com (ErsatzPogo) writes:
>>Most other languages have more inflexions. But languages
>>like Swedish or German wouldn't be so hard to do, I think.
>>What is needed is more properties for each object, for instance
>>one property to indicate which form of the definite article to use,
>>one to indicate how the plural is formed, etc. Highly inflected
>>languages, say Russian or Finnish, would be harder to do well.
>>Russian has three genders and six cases, conjugates verbs according
>>to both person and tense, and has a lot of exceptions to the rules.
>
>And where in i-f is it necessary to conjugate verbs to anything other
>than the imperative (or whatever that case is called)?
>

When the game describes for the the player what happens. IMO, most of
the complexity in inflected languages would be on the output side, to
ensure that all messages the game prints are grammatically correct.

> throw ball at monkeys
> The monkeys play with the ball for a while.

It that would be translated to Russian, the game has to know the
instrumental case of the object thrown (the ball in this example).
Verb conjugation would in pratice not be much of a problem; only in
past tense if the subject isn't known beforehand.

BTW, Jigsaw, with the unknown genders of the player and Black, would
be difficult to translate into Russian. Any sentence in the past tense
with Black (or the player) as the grammatical subject would reveal
the gender (the verb ending would tell).

-- Bjorn