7 ms·
It’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language
by tbrock 8y ago
It’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language without severe lingual contortions.
- chrisper 8y agoThen explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?
- rhapsodic 8y ago>Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else? Probably because some French law mandates it.
- ralusek 8y agoThey haven't gotten over the whole "lingua Franca" thing.
- coldtea 8y agoWell, it will take the British and Americans a long time to go over the same thing as well when the time comes...
- michaelmrose 8y agoGet back to me in 20 years and we'll see how that went.
- coldtea 8y agoWho said it has to be in 20 years? It took a couple of centuries for the French.
- jgh 8y agoGigaoctet isn't exactly a severe linguistic contortion though.
- moolcool 8y agoThey actively avoid loan words from English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française#Anglicisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française#Anglicisms
- jgh 8y agoExcept weekend. They couldn't come up with a better word for that ;)
- enriquto 8y agoI use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.
- felipemnoa 8y agoWhich is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages. P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation looks completely different? Here are the Translations for weekend for each Romance language and Latin: French - fin de semaine Spanish - fin de semana Romanian - sfârșit de săptămână Portuguese - final de semana Italian - fine settimana Latin - volutpat vestibulum Notice how only Latin looks completely different. I wonder if google translate is broken.
- l9k 8y agoOctet is actually a more precise word as it implies there are 8 bits (or people, or things...) Byte only represents a group of bits.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoTechnically true, and there were some weird-ass byte sizes in the early decades of computing, but the 8-bit byte has been universal for, I think, around 40 years now?
- acchow 8y ago> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- reustle 8y agoSomething like リニキス カーネル ネットワークイング サブシステム It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.
- nneonneo 8y agoI think that the proper term is "Linuxカーネルネットワークサブシステム" meaning "Linux Kernel Network Subsystem".
- snowpanda 8y agoWhat is katakana?
- nneonneo 8y agoJapanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords. Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".
- elgenie 8y agoKatakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
- lgessler 8y agoTangential: it's worth noting that this is a historical circumstance rather than something that has to do with French in itself. When a new domain arises that a language didn't previously have words for, like computing, "home-grown" (as opposed to borrowed) words can be more or less successful. Take the French Academy for example, whose attempts at purging French of English loanwords[1] has had mixed success. (And see also the Central Hindi Directorate[2].) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#Anglicisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#A... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hindi_Directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hindi_Directorate
- greenhatman 8y agoWe learned a lot of Afrikaans tech words in computer science in high school in South Africa. It's pretty useless for me. I've never used any of it since, and have forgotten most of it.
- andriesm 8y agoFellow Afrikaansie here. There were some very novel Afrikaans words for computer terminology in that school computer science handbook... However none of it seems to be that useful or much used at all, and English accesses the latest tech and many major western tech hubs. I suspect this is the case for my languages, especially those spoken in very few countries or by smallish population groups, especially when the language speaking group is not Geographically close to other populations of a grammatically closely related language. I am busy studying Georgian because I am relocating to the eastern European country. However I remain doubtful that Georgian will be that useful for technical computer stuff, because it has only around 4 million speakers and is linguistically close to almost no other widely spoken language. I will find out soon, as my language skills and experience with the place collide.
- jcranmer 8y agoSystème de réseau de noyau Linux? Cache associatif de 8 sets? Those aren't severe linguistic contortions...
- tachyonbeam 8y agoYour Google translation is no good. Sets is an English word, and it would be associative (feminine form). That being said, the reason I, as a French speaker working in tech/research, prefer to discuss tech in English, is because: 1. There is always new terminology being invented in conferences or bleeding edge R&D. There is no official translation for most of these terms. You could translate them, but most people wouldn't be quite sure what you mean. 2. Anything I write in English is immediately accessible to 20x more people. Writing about tech in French means sacrificing most of my audience. English really is the lingua franca of tech. It doesn't bother me at all, even though it's not my native language. The world needs a lingua franca (of tech and everything else), and English fits the bill quite well. It's much less overcomplicated than many other languages. I make many more grammar mistakes in French, because French grammar is full of arbitrary nonsensical rules. No thanks.
- pyrale 8y ago> Sets is an English word "There is no word for entrepreneur in french" Seriously... "collection of things," mid-15c., from Old French sette "sequence," variant of secte "religious community," from Medieval Latin secta "retinue," from Latin secta "a following"
- jcranmer 8y agoI did not use Google translation. I went to the French Wikipedia articles, which used cache associatif. But even if you want to quibble word choice, the fact remains that there's no severe linguistic contortion. Sure, French doesn't permit chaining nouns in the same way that English does. But the de chains are still permitted, and aren't much more wordy.
- remram 8y ago"sets" is the English word you used
- rumianteolor 8y agoTranslation of "Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem" = Subsistema de red del núcleo de Linux. Translation of "8-way associative cache" = caché asociativa de 8-vías. I don't see severe lingual cortortions here.
- krylon 8y ago> núcleo I really like that word. I thought it was only used in IBM mainframe parlance.
- blattimwind 8y agoNetzwerksubsystem des Linux-Systemkerns achtfach assoziativer Zwischenspeicher This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering terms for almost anything (including computers due to some parallel developments), though these are often not so related (esp. mechanical eng.)
- zerb 8y ago"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
- matt-snider 8y agoGerman just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like: - Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten" - Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed" I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.
- zerb 8y agoI believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious. Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
- sergioj97 8y agoIn Spanish we have also technical terms for those. I guess it's the same with most other languages. However it's true that there are some terms without a proper translation and it's obviously more international to use the English ones.
- coldtea 8y agoPerhaps you don't speak French? Both of these are very easy and not contrived.
- m-p-3 8y ago"Sous-système du noyau Linux" "Cache associative à 8 directions"
- andrepd 8y ago"Subsistema de rede do kernel do Linux" "Cache associativa (8-way)" or "Cache associativa por 8 vias" See, not so difficult. :^) It's just that, for standardization's sake, it's best to just communicate in English.
- progval 8y agoEasy: "Sous-système réseau du noyau Linux" and "cache associatif octodirectionnel". There are many other words much harder to translate than these ones, like "backslash", "hash map", "pipeline", "placeholder", ...
- gcb0 8y agoI thought that too. until I had to talk in english full time and realized how much was transliterated informally in conversations and how those terms were corrupted into the national language. what you call lingual contortion only seem odd (to me and you since you also mentioned a romance language) because romance languages were the trend setters at some point and now have very refined processes to change the language and be more permissive of foreign words creeping in, since they understand the power of allowing or not this to happen. but over time, they will officialize new words in the romance language just fine. english is no better or worse at this. case in point, every single "fancy" word in english cames from the roman dominion over the channel. it was fancy to talk like the emperor. and that is only one of the subtle aspects that rome knew how to play on the colonies cultural subjugation.
- njarboe 8y ago"roman dominion over the channel" Do you mean how the Normans conquered and ruled England after the invasion of 1066? Lots of foreign words come into a language when your rulers speak another language. Often the conquered populations are completely converted to the ruling people language.
- gcb0 8y agoyep. thats what I mean.
- dzhshnacct 8y agoactually even the english way is quite cumbersome languages like sanskrit and chinese which have built in word generators and preserved root meanings are much better and able to stand independently not surprisingly indians and chinese have been better able to resist westernization imo chinese is a very tech friendly language and has a good shot at becoming the lingua franca of tech in the near future currently the chinese focus on science and innovation is fake and forced but could turn real in the next generation
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe handicap for Chinese and Asian languages is charactersets and input. A finite phonetic alphabet is a tremendous technical advantage when keyboarding, and alternatives really haven't proved superior. (I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects here.)
- dzhshnacct 8y agohey thats one of the things i've worked on see my first submission a few days ago on zh android ime with devanagari with zhuyin and alternatives chinese input is not a problem and this is going to even be less of a problem with voice input in future in fact the input problem only tightened the link chinese have to tech via their phones but pinyin needs to go away or chinese will lose their culture in the long term latinization is going to lead to christianization
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pyrale 8y ago> Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem "module réseau du noyau Linux ?" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/Virtual/linux.pdf https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/... > 8-Way associative cache "Cache 8-associatif" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/Caches/ https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/... Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean much it doesn't exist. If only, because we have to be able to teach it efficiently to people with no mastery of the english language.
- pvaldes 8y agoSubsistema de red de trabajo del núcleo de linux Caché asociativa de ocho vías.