Re: Non-english IF?!


12 Dec 1995 23:56:04 -0500

>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)?

The main problem, I think, would be in languages that take different
standard word order, or worse yet, aren't word-order-dependent at all.
(Can you imagine writing a parser for Latin? Brrr.) Still, you've got a
fair amount of leeway there -- I know TADS at least accepts sentences of
the form VERB PREP IOBJ DOBJ, specifically for non-English uses.

Other than parser troubles, the most time-consuming task, it would seem to
me, would be translating all the libraries and message files -- which is
doable in both TADS and Inform.

Neil