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I find this interesting because my native tongue, Finnish, is quite good about accepting neologisms. People do use English terms, but it's also very common tha
by chousuke 8y ago
I find this interesting because my native tongue, Finnish, is quite good about accepting neologisms.
People do use English terms, but it's also very common that there exists a native word and people will use that. Calling computers "kompuutteri" would sound hilariously old-timey compared to "tietokone" (or "tietsikka"). The same goes for "telefooni" vs. "puhelin", though curiously enough I'm perfectly fine using both "pointteri" and "osoitin" when speaking about programming.
I guess part of it is because Finnish is not Germanic so direct loans sound bad... Often they get nativized so that eg a laptop in colloquial speech becomes "läppäri"
- leadingthenet 8y agoHungarian is the same. Finno-ugrics ftw! “Computer” is non-existent in Hungarian, we call it számitógép, built from the words számitás (to calculate) and gép (machine). Since most Hungarian words are constructed like that, it sounds completely native to the language. I cringe whenever I hear English words mixed in with Hungarian ones, they sound completely out of place, which is probably not true for German.
- jacobush 8y agoI think we can roughly equate Swedish with German, and gosh do English words sound "cringe" in Swedish. Luckily, we can often use the direct translation, English being very Germanic. Pointer becomes "pekare" for instance. Mouse "mus" and so on. So people recognize what it came from and can use the familiar sounding native version. "Computer" becomes "dator" meaning something operating on "data". "Data" is "data" in both. "Linked list" is "länkad lista". You see the pattern?