English speakers of the fedi.
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@dhobern I guess the noun-form is most likely the intention of (the founding generation of) UI designers, now that youentioned it. And probably that's how it's trans later to the lqngiages7that don't use the imperative form. Good point!
I think it was always somewhat messy. I worked for IBM in the late 80s and early 90s and there was a lot of focus on Common User Access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
The standard for OS/2 was that each window application's menu was supposed to start with File, then Edit, and a couple of other standard menus.
Even then, although File could be interpreted as a verb, in context it had to be the noun, while Edit would seem to be the verb.
The "The Windows interface : an application design guide" is at the Internet Archive. Pages 79 and 80 say that menu items may be the names of actions, documents or windows and that the top level items should accurately reflect what's under them.
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@eltonfc @seachaint Native speaker and, I said imperative but. Oh! Er it's a bit more subtle than that for me.
Menu entries (leaf nodes) are definitely imperative. "Save!" "Open!" "Undo!!".
Menu bar categories ("edit", "format", "view") are infinitive, *except* when navigating the menu where they can take on any form including the noun inside a (usually reverse ordered) verb phrase. "edit, undo", "Format paragraph", "file: open." are all different. -
Oh, that's very true. Or not even verbs. The "File" menu is a collection of commands which relate to file handling (open, close, etc.), not a command _to file_.
(Although it occurs to me that reading Edit as a verb may be how "Preferences" got stuck there in some standards, even though it doesn't have much to do with other Edit operations cut/copy/paste.)
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@sara in Finnish is it simpler to just write the verb in the imperative? Does have a single form or does ir flex with the person (formal, informal, etc?)
I remember a guy that shoved a whole lexical analyzer in a SNES ROM just to properly translate and decline the player's name in a Finnish translation of Chrono Trigger
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I answered "infinitive" but only because these don't feel like imperatives. I do not feel like I am commanding the software to *OPEN MY FILE!*
As an aside, I think your expansion of an infinitive-based reading may be misleading since, in English, "to do this" could be read as a declaration of purpose, which is not what the infinitive (or the gerund, come to that) represents.
My feeling is that these labels work just as labels, with it being purely a convenience of space and habit whether they are expressed as verbs or nouns, i.e. Open = "Here is the menu or item that has to do with opening files", but Settings = "Here is the menu or item that has to do with settings".
That's closer to a noun-form for a verb than a command, so it's more infinitive-adjacent than imperative-like, but I think the categories are inappropriate.
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Iff English is your second language, how are these verbs tusually translated to *your* language in software interfaces?
@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.
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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.
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@eltonfc My thinking was probably more influenced by learning imperative programming languages than by being English.
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Iff English is your second language, how are these verbs tusually translated to *your* language in software interfaces?
@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
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@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.
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@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.
@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)
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
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)
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@eltonfc to me, it doesn't read as infinitive if it isn't preceded by "to".. save = imperative, to save = infinitive -
@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)
@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.
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@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
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@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.
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@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.
@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.
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English speakers of the fedi. In a software with the interface in English, Reading a menu with verbs such as Save, Open, Close, Edit, Format etc., do you read them as imperative (an order: "do this") or as an infinitive (the "base form" of the verb, like "to do this")?
Are you a native speaker or have English as a second language?
#Dev #ux #ui #software #interface #translation #uiux #uxui #gui
@eltonfc I picked option one, but I'm not sure I understand what an infinitive is even after looking it up
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