English speakers of the fedi.

[jubalbarca@scholar.social]

@eltonfc I'm not sure I really read them as either, though infinitive has to be closer I guess. The edit button is The Edit Button, it probably opens the Edit Menu, and so by using it I am not in my brain expressing any view or command about whether I want to edit or am commanding an edit, I am just trying to access or perhaps ascertain that particular software feature which may or may not be tied to what I'd think of as editing.

[brad@1040ste.net]

@eltonfc Depends to some degree - if the menu is hierarchical then non-leaf options or those leading to dialogues (usually marked with an ellipsis) are infinitive and leaf options without an ellipsis are imperative, to me.

[tarmil@mastodon.tarmil.fr]

@R1Rail @eltonfc And it's far from the only situation where English used the imperative and French uses the infinitive. Recipes are another example.

[krnlg@mastodon.social]

@eltonfc
Interesting that I'm (so far) in the minority with Native+Imperative. But when learning (badly, in school) French the main thing that never entirely clicked for me was the whole "To Do", "To Read" thing as an actual word form so maybe I just don't get something fundamental here 🙂

[rc_1290@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eltonfc Yes

[rc_1290@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eltonfc also, it's more and more likely to have a machine translation, in which case the answer is "poorly".

[krnlg@mastodon.social]

@eltonfc
To me, the menu item is moooostly a command to do the thing or open the dialog. There is an element of "I click this to do the thing" but it doesn't feel like a separate thing to me, it doesn't really feel like different grammar at all. And the menu options don't say "To Format" so it doesn't mean "To Format".

As you might guess, I never really "got" grammar at school even in English classes 🙂

[feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eltonfc I don't know if I speak English at all, because I have no idea what imperative or infinitive should mean in that context 😅

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@eltonfc Oooooo.

I come from the generation in Britain that wasn't formally taught any advanced grammar in our native language.

I *think* I go by imperative. I will answer the poll in that way shortly.

But also, these menu items are so abstracted, and often shown with only a symbol, that I often don't think of them with the meanings of the words, really.

Save: I won't lose my work.
Open: browse through my folder structure to find what I want.
Close: "I don't want this"

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@eltonfc oddly if I am thinking about software in German, I think I expect the infinitive 🤔

[oneinterestingfact@mastodon.ie]

@eltonfc

But there’s confusion within the question: I click save to save my changes which is imperative - computer do this.
When I look at the menu it offers me choices - this is how to…

What I want is to know how to so that I can issue the command.

So I don’t even know if my answer is the same from one minute to the next.

[torf@c.im]

@eltonfc I've chosen "infinitive in my language", which is mostly true, but sometimes they are translated as nouns.

And I hope "second language" which sounds very vague for me means plainly "foreign", i.e. "not unconsciously learned in childhood".

[trbutler@mastodon.faithtree.social]

@eltonfc @santi It's funny, if you made me just answer quickly, I'd say imperative is the closer of the two. But, thinking of infinitives as “verbal nouns," that noun-ish sense is probably how I think of it. I suspect that's a shift over decades from “I'm telling the computer to do this" to “This is the place where certain things are done.”

[santi@gone.lema.org]

@eltonfc Interesting yet unsurprising results already. I suspect the reason translations at least in Latin languages went for the infinitive is because they just wouldn’t know what form/person to use.

French would look weird in imperative:
(Tu)   Enregistre
(Vous) Enregistrez

Recently French online shops decided to go with « Je confirme » or « Je commande », as in present tense for “I confirm” , “I order” for actions.

Anyways as always when it gets too complicated latin languages settle down on infinitive (Enregistrer).

[virtulis@loud.computer]

@eltonfc oh, that's an interesting question. I never really thought about it and I think it... explains some things?

Do I understand correctly, the question is whether I interpret "close" as "i want (the computer) to close the file" versus "computer, close the file"?

Because now I realize i've never ever talked to a computer the way people talk to chatbots and maybe that's one of the reasons it feels really weird. Well, in addition to all those other reasons.

So yeah, infinitive in every case and every language for me. I'm communicating a desire for a thing to be done, not giving orders.

Edit: and yeah, at least in Latvian and Russian it is and always was infinitive. Saglabāt, сохранить, etc. Never even crossed my mind it's completely ambiguous in English.

[johannes@front-end.social]

@eltonfc Second language here.

In Norwegian the menu item verbs are imperative, and it never occurred to me that the English menu items weren't.

[virtulis@loud.computer]

@eltonfc and for some verbs imperative makes no sense to me at all.

Surely, when I click "rename file" the actual command is "present me with an input field to enter a new name"? I'm the one doing the renaming. The stupid piece of metal is just logging my actions to the best of its ability.

[btw@kolektiva.social]

@eltonfc In Portuguese, verbs are infinitives, so “edit” if translated literally would be “edite” (imperative), but since I had used software in Portuguese before and knew the translation patterns, I always ended up associating ‘edit’ with “editar” (infinitive).

[corb_the_lesser@mastodon.social]

@eltonfc I'm not sure I think of them as words of any form, but rather as labels on a button/menu to be activated (clicking or pressing a key) to initiate an action.

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@virtulis @eltonfc

To me:

"Rename file [to a name I will provide]."

I wonder how much this has to do with growing up with command-line interfaces vs graphical ones.