English speakers of the fedi.

[sara@mastodontti.fi]

@eltonfc @dhobern I don't know if it's simpler, finnish has 5 different indefinitive cases though :)

Also Everything conjugates based on person :p

[firefly@frogs.lgbt]

@dhobern @eltonfc out of curiosity, what's your read on commands in command-line interfaces?

(they feel quite imperative to me, and while I never thought much actively about it I think in a sense GUI actions kind of transfer over from that)

[geoliberal@mastodon.social]

@eltonfc Example of imperative in English, infinitive in Spanish. Conjugation in Romance languages can get complex and the infinitive offers a way to describe the action while minimising accidental complexity. This will always be useful, but it was probably essential in the resource constrained environments of the 70s and 80s where UIs were born.

[dhobern@scicomm.xyz]

@firefly @eltonfc

I forgot but meant to say that some of the standard menu structure feels object-oriented to me. The File menu is for an imagined File object and represents a set of methods on that object (new(), save(), etc.) but it's not possible to parse all the menu items that way.

As for CLI interfaces, I guess you are right. They often feel more imperative. rm, rmdir, cat, etc.

[woo@fosstodon.org]

@eltonfc My thinking was probably more influenced by learning imperative programming languages than by being English.

[guilevi@comunidad.nvda.es]

@eltonfc This is really interesting to me because I speak both Catalan and Spanish natively, and in Catalan they are translated primarily as imperative and in Spanish as infinitive

[sarahghp@post.lurk.org]

@eltonfc in English the infinitive is with "to," so they have to be imperative. I think is more a misunderstanding of English to read them as infinitives, native speaker or not.

[eltonfc@bertha.social]

@sarahghp maybe it was an oversimplification on my párt. Probably a better description would be "the noum form of the verb", which coincides with the infinitive.

But There are also cases like: "The computer should SAVE the file" which is not imperative. (Ok, modal verbs make things more complicated, but the modal verb is absent in the interface)

[tux0r@layer8.space]

@eltonfc @thomas Third language, not applicable. ;-)

[shadowfals@toot.cat]

@eltonfc @forestine

I'm surprised by the popularity of the first answer. To me, the verbs or verb phrases on menus mean "If I/you want to ___."

Now I'm curious how often the native English speakers are interpreting the words as imperatives in first-person perspective and how often in second-person perspective. Are the orders for the software to follow or directed at them as the user?

— native English speaker (originally from multilingual area) and writer (who's made site and game menus), using computers since 1990s (with later process analyst experience), mostly GUIs (used to work in graphic design)

[star@toki.melikule.xyz]

@eltonfc to me, it doesn't read as infinitive if it isn't preceded by "to".. save = imperative, to save = infinitive

[sarahghp@post.lurk.org]

@eltonfc I think it is a cool question and I am interested in the responses. For me "should save" is just a polite imperative.

But others noted that they read View, for instance, as the place where View is the topic and not the action, so I agree it can get complex and noun-y. Or especially File. That is a case where it feels like, here we are making decisions about files.

[leonardof@bertha.social]

@eltonfc In Italian, the negative imperative uses the infinitive, at least in the present tense (I don't remember the other tenses). "parlare" means to talk, "non parlare" means do not talk

[mattskala@mstdn.io]

@eltonfc Native speaker here. After thinking about it I selected "infinitive" rather than "imperative" but I'm not sure that really captures how I perceive these words, because in English *these are not two different things*. It doesn't say "Save[infinitive]" or "Safe[imperative]." It just says Save!

TBH part of my reason for choosing "infinitive" is that that's what I would translate it into if translating the menu to another language, so on some level, I guess that's what I think it is.

[mattskala@mstdn.io]

@eltonfc On the other hand, to be really correct the infinitive isn't "Save", it's "To save", and we certainly wouldn't put that on a menu. So maybe they really are imperatives.

[mpurpureus@yiff.life]

@eltonfc I picked option one, but I'm not sure I understand what an infinitive is even after looking it up