On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Joop Eggen wrote:
> In fact, for an artificial language one could decide the affair
> democratically by statistics: which languages use infinitive, which
> imperative.
> All in alphabetical order:
>
> IMPERATIVE
> Bulgarian*, (English), Turkish
>
> INFINITIVE
> (English), German
>
> *) Bulgarian has no infinitive, so I assume the imperative.
This would be an interesting study. Not knowing many other
languages, i hope that someone else will do it. :)
But, i agree with Bertilo (kiel kutime :). The argument that
convinced me is that infinitives are ambiguous while imperatives are
unforgiving. A menu is a series of choices. "File"?, "Edit"?, etc.
If the menu uses the imperative, then the menu is "File this!"
followed by another command "Edit this!" which may disappear when
"File" is chosen after following orders. With infinitives, the menu
is "To file, click me" or "In order to get to files, click me". If
the user is not interested in that choice, there are other choices
available like "To edit this file", etc.
In fact, i only became aware of this distinction in Esperanto.
Now that i am working on programs/websites in other languages, i am
more consistent... and prefer infinitives.
So, i am with the group that feels that this is not a bug.
--
universero trio
Esperanto, The International Language! What's that? See http://Esperanto.Org
--
Wrong usage of infitive case instead of imperative case in verbs - almost
everywhere!
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/66223
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