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To extend the point made by @GuiA, many technical terms make reference or analagy to non-technical nouns. Imagine if all technical terms were based in a natural

To extend the point made by @GuiA, many technical terms make reference or analagy to non-technical nouns. Imagine if all technical terms were based in a natural language you don't understand. French would be appropriate in this case, but if you speak French then imagine all the words in were in Chinese, or Esperanto, or Klingon. It would be much harder to remember them.

ars 13y ago
All words are like that. They use the sound from another language, not the meaning. Go see some of the examples in my reply to him. I could type for hours showing you examples. Just because it's technical doesn't make it special. Do you call it bokeh or do you try to explain it in English? What about schwa? It has a meaning in its original language after all. But instead you just use the sound from that language. (And I deliberately picked obscure examples.)
- ewoodrich 13y ago
  How about umami? It's a borrow-word, but in general use we loosely refer to it as "savory" because it is easier for the unacquainted to understand. I don't really get what's so offensive about the French using a more immediately parse-able term when possible.
  - ars 13y ago
    We explain it as savory, but we call it umami.
- breischl 13y ago
  Sure, languages steal words. It makes perfect sense when you're trying to explain something that is a completely new concept, or at least one that has no close analogue already in the language. The English language didn't have any concept for "the out of focus area of a photograph" so you might as well import that one. But when a language already has a closely related concept it is still much easier to analogize that rather than import a word from another language. The French already had a word for "search", so why should they ignore that? Perhaps they could have called it an "engine de recherche" but that's just silly. Would you also suggest that they just use the entire phrase "Google Book Search" unchanged, rather than translating the individual words?

ars 13y ago

All words are like that. They use the sound from another language, not the meaning. Go see some of the examples in my reply to him. I could type for hours showing you examples. Just because it's technical doesn't make it special. Do you call it bokeh or do you try to explain it in English? What about schwa? It has a meaning in its original language after all. But instead you just use the sound from that language. (And I deliberately picked obscure examples.)

ewoodrich 13y ago
How about umami? It's a borrow-word, but in general use we loosely refer to it as "savory" because it is easier for the unacquainted to understand. I don't really get what's so offensive about the French using a more immediately parse-able term when possible.
- ars 13y ago
  We explain it as savory, but we call it umami.
breischl 13y ago
Sure, languages steal words. It makes perfect sense when you're trying to explain something that is a completely new concept, or at least one that has no close analogue already in the language. The English language didn't have any concept for "the out of focus area of a photograph" so you might as well import that one. But when a language already has a closely related concept it is still much easier to analogize that rather than import a word from another language. The French already had a word for "search", so why should they ignore that? Perhaps they could have called it an "engine de recherche" but that's just silly. Would you also suggest that they just use the entire phrase "Google Book Search" unchanged, rather than translating the individual words?