3 ms·
I guess Russian is in a better position because it doesn't use compounds so much—but it made the borrowed programming terms into Russian words by freely inflect
by aasasd 7y ago
I guess Russian is in a better position because it doesn't use compounds so much—but it made the borrowed programming terms into Russian words by freely inflecting them, which is a very Russian trait. Whenever an imported word doesn't sound quite right for Russian, it gets adjusted fast, similarly to how this occurs in Japanese.
We now have a set of programming terms that are a mix of: borrowings which already existed in other contexts (possibly of Latin or similar roots), Russian words instead of English ones, and straight up transliterated calques. This all coexists completely naturally because the words now serve as roots for further derivation and forming a layer of slang on top of the formal terms. Notably, young people are quick to appropriate foreign words—and they tend to be the ones who get into new tech.
There were (joking?) proposals for using Russian-root words for computing terms, and by now they sound like bringing an Orthodox priest speaking Old Church Slavonic into a datacenter.
- andrewshadura 7y agoInterestingly Slovak and Czech have no problems whatsoever to use native Slavic words for technical terms, e.g. súbor for file (literally a collection of data, think сбор/собор in Russian), snímač for sensor (lit. taking off something, similar to the Russian съёмник), obrazovka for screen (place for images; compare to the Russian образ (image) and экран (screen, from the French écran)). There are more but I can't think of any right now :)
- aasasd 7y agoNot sure how ‘súbor’ is properly pronounced, but it seems Russian also has a computer-related connotation for it: https://i.imgur.com/JdgltUj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/JdgltUj.jpg Including my favorite variant, the “Russian-English Computer Learning Set”: http://sannata.org/articles/subor.shtml http://sannata.org/articles/subor.shtml Though the manufacturer appears to be wholly Chinese.
- gdy 7y agoIt is very typical for Russians that we often feel awkward using old words in a new meaning to denote new concepts. Somehow it feels silly and imprecise, and we prefer to borrow the word from the language where a concept originated. At the same time, in colloquial language we happen to replace English words with unrelated but similarly sounding Russian words. For example, saying мыло (soap) instead of 'mail' or 'поймать лося' (catch a moose) for activated stop loss order.