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.
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.)
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.
Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).
I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).
- 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.
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".
c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/syntax
(One of my favourite wwebsites.)
... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.
This is what I meant about the meaning being obscured too much, so it has to be simply memorized as one chunk.
I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.
I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.
English is just more difficult to spell because there no simple rule for when a compound is written with or without space (or with a dash, as is sometimes the case). E.g. Christmas is Christ + mass, but is written in a single word.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
Weihnachten comes from weih/geweiht meaning hol{y,ied} night.
In many cases this may just be due to English's distance from it's root (i.e. Latin, French). As it was pointed out below, "syntax" is also a composition of two simpler words - they just aren't words we know. In German, there are also loan words from Latin and French, but I do have the impression it is not to the same extent, and the German language is quite consistent.
From grandparent: > In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word.
This is true, but the difficulty is to know when two or more nouns are considered a compound noun (Zusammensetzung) or just a group of words (Wortgruppe).
For example consider the following (real) street names:
- Schleißheimer Straße
- Hohenzollernstraße
- Leuchtenbergerstraße
Straße is simply street. Schleißheim is the name of a place. Schleißheimer Straße is written as two separate words because the rule [2] says that combinations with geographic names ending in -er that signify a place (and not the people living in that place, for example) are usually not considered compounds. A simple counterexample would be Hohenzollernstraße with Hohenzollern referring to the House of Hohenzollern.
Now consider a case like Leuchtenbergerstraße. Leuchtenberger can refer to the place called Leuchtenberg or the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It would be written Leuchtenberger Straße if it had to do anything with the city of Leuchtenberg, maybe leading to that place. If it is named in the honor of the Duke it would be written Leuchtenbergerstraße.
Another problem is that often nouns are not simply slapped together. Adding an additional s (Fugen-s[3]) between the words is very common.
For example: traffic is Verkehr, sign is Zeichen, traffic sign is not Verkehrzeichen but Verkehrszeichen. On the other hand: tax is Steuer and transfer tax is Verkehrsteuer, but not Verkehrsssteuer.
dog is Hund and leash is Leine. A dog leash is a Hundeleine, addding an additional e in this case. Sometimes nothing is added but something removed: crown is Krone, prince is Prinz and a crown prince is a Kronprinz, leaving out the final e in Krone.
Compounding in German is complicated and weird.
[1] The only rule i know is: "It's written as two words, except for a few well known exceptions." I suspect that there is more to it and I'd be happy for any enlightenment.
[2] https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/getrenn...
Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).
My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.
I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!
- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.
- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.
The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.
"module réseau du noyau Linux ?" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/...
> 8-Way associative cache
"Cache 8-associatif" 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.
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.
"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"
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.
As others hinted.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#A...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hindi_Directorate
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.
There are many other words much harder to translate than these ones, like "backslash", "hash map", "pipeline", "placeholder", ...
"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.
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.
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.
> In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part.
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.
Huh. I did not know it was such a young word. :)
Byte only represents a group of bits.
Probably because some French law mandates it.
I really like that word. I thought it was only used in IBM mainframe parlance.
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
(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.)
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
How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?
Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).
The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.
And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.
Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …
Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en
An example from the thread[1]:
Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar"
This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse").
[1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400
Similarly, New Gold Mountain is Melbourne Australia near where the Australian gold rush started soon after.
One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules.
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.
The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words.
As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد" after all.
There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
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".
Caché asociativa de ocho vías.