On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Ruediger Landmann
<r.landmann@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
>>
>> Really? Isn't using &DISTRO; a pretty good way to go, as opposed to
>> doing manual search and replace on "Fedora"? On the other hand, I'm
>> sure the usage wasn't consistent throughout which is surely a problem
>> in itself.
>>
>
> Some languages attach various grammatical elements (articles, prepositions,
> case markers) to nouns, which means that an entity that always appears
> exactly the same way in English may take a number of different forms in a
> target language that behaves this way.
>
> By way of illustration: In Czech, if "Fedora" is the subject of a sentence,
> it's written "Fedora". However, if "Fedora" is the direct object of the
> sentence, it becomes "Fedoru", if it has a possessive sense ("Fedora's" or
> "of Fedora" in English), it becomes "Fedory", if it's an indirect object or
> indicating a location ("to Fedora", "in Fedora") it's "Fedoře", and if it
> has an "instrumental" sense ("with Fedora") it's "Fedorou" . So:
>
> "Fedora is a Linux distribution" -> "Fedora je linuxová distribuce" (note
> also what happens to "Linux" in this sentence; if it were the subject of the
> sentence it would be "linuxové")
>
> but
>
> "Get Fedora" -> "Stáhnout Fedoru"
>
> and
>
> "Installation of Fedora" -> "Inštalácia Fedory"
>
> and
>
> "People involved in Fedora" -> "Lidé podílející se na Fedoře"
>
> and
>
> "The most common problems with Fedora" -> "Nejběžnější problémy s Fedorou"
>
> (there's another form as well, the "vocative", which you would use when
> calling out to Fedora - "Oh mighty Fedora!" - but I can't find a practical
> example of this) But in short: seven different grammatical cases represented
> by six different forms of the word; all supposed to be represented by one
> single entity in English. [1]
>
> English pronouns still inflect for grammatical case, so this would be like
> deciding to set an entity for the word "he". That's fine as the subject of a
> sentence, but what do you do when the sentence needs the pronoun to change
> to "him" or "his"?
>
> Thanks Paul for the pointers to fedora-trans-list and the package
> maintainer's site. I still need a few of these signposts :) and thanks to
> all for the positive feedback so far.
>
> Cheers
> Rudi
>
>
> [1] Actually, I'm not a Czech speaker. The situation is very similar in
> Russian (which I know a little) but didn't want to use that as an example
> because of the different alphabet. The examples I've used here, however, are
> collected from the Internet (in particular, from http://www.fedora.cz/ ),
> and are not of my own devising. My apologies to any Czech speakers reading
> this if I haven't got things quite right! Even if I have munged things up a
> little at some point, I think it still illustrates the pitfalls of using
> entities that indicate a particular form in English when translating into a
> highly-inflected target language. Russian and Czech have seven cases for
> nouns. Finnish has fifteen, and Hungarian has seventeen.
>
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I may be showing my ignorance here.....but I thought that since
Fedora is a trademark, and a proper name that it was always Fedora.
Much as I am always David regardless of what country I may be in or
language I may be speaking.
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