Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and that's a strange choice of a name considering the whole website is in English (despite being from France).

I've seen this remark quite often when the word (fr)"coq" comes up. It's a non-english word that's homophonous to (en)"cock", but... so what?

In french, the word (fr)"bite" translates to "cock". It's pronounced like (en)"bit". And while a lot of people prefer "octet", "bit" has very much become part of the french vocabulary. So, what do we do?

We don't care. We giggle at it when we're in high school and then it stops being funny. In Swedish, (en)"sex" and (en)"six" are the same word (se)"sex", pronounced the same way. They don't care.

I also feel like some people here might be forgetting that (en)"cock" has other meanings in English, including the male bird which is what (fr)"coq" means

Edit: Prefixed everything because this post was far too confusing.

'Bit' does not translate as 'octet'. 'Byte' does.

Minor remarque changing nothing in the meaning of your message.

Uh, you're totally right. I'm completely losing my french, not using it :)

PS: remark, not remarque ;)

And actually byte and octet aren't identical (octet is less technically ambiguous, since bytes aren't always 8 bits but octets are.)

That's a really cool point I never realized!

> I also feel like some people here might be forgetting that (en)"cock" has other meanings in English, including the male bird which is what (fr)"coq" means

Which (en)"cock" does (fr)"bite" translate to?

The genitalia.

Wouldn't "bite" in French sound more like "beet" in English?

Yes, but in french, (en)"bit" is also pronounced with a longer "i" sound than in English, so "bit" in french is also pronounced more like the english "beet".

Try playing with https://translate.google.com - the audio is very fair on it (albeit spoken much slower than you normally would).

Some people say it's a revenge to “bit”.

well, INRIA is french national research institute and the national pet is the Coq (rooster) (edit : laurent I guess you are french, I'm just saying that for those who are not from France :)

Isn't it also somehow related to "Calculus Of Constructions"? Always made me think about that, not sure why.

Thierry Coquand is the creator of CoC and co-creator of Coq, so they're definitely related. :)

It's almost certainly a bit of a joke on anglophones. I mean, just look at their logo.

not a joke, but a wellspring of bad jokes.

The name was picked by French people who were not aware of the English word.

Sure, and French don't have a word for "entrepreneur" neither

They were certainly aware of the english word. But I think they are too proud of their mother language to care :)

oh they care, that's why they went with the name IIRC. native english speakers being uncomfortable with the name was an advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com