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One of the eventual goals of the Ubiquity project is to bring some of its functionality and ideas to Firefox proper. To this end, Aza has been exploring some possible options for what that would look like (round 1, round 2). All of his mockups, however, use English examples. I’m going to start exploring what Ubiquity in Firefox might look like in different kinds of languages. Let’s kick this off with my mother tongue, Japanese.¹

今後多様な言語に対応したFirefox内のUbiquityを検討していきますが、その中でも今日は日本語をとりあげます。後日日本語で同じ内容を投稿するつもりです。^^ 日本語でのコメントも大歓迎です！

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Earlier today I blogged on three different strategies languages use to mark the roles of different arguments: word order, marking on the arguments, and marking on the verbs.

I gathered some data from the fantastic World Atlas of Language Structures to put together a survey of many of the languages on the Internet. For each of the languages, I got the canonical word order and whether the language marks the role of its argument on the verb and/or the arguments themselves.

As you can see, there are a number of data points that are still missing. Please contribute information on the languages you speak! You can edit the spreadsheet on Google Docs. Thanks!

UPDATE: Contribute information on how your language identifies its arguments here.

When we execute a command in Ubiquity, in very simple terms, we’re hoping to do something (a verb) to some arguments (the nouns). Every sentence in every language uses some method to encode which arguments correspond to which roles of the verb. Here are a couple examples:

1
2

He sees Mary.
彼が Maryを 見る。 (Kare-ga Mary-o miru.)

As speakers of English, you can read sentence (1) above and know exactly who is doing the seeing and who is being seen and speakers of Japanese can get the same information from (2). How do different languages code for arguments in different roles? There are, broadly speaking, three different ways:

We’ll take a brief look today at these three different strategies, all of which a localizeable natural language interface will surely encounter.

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