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chrisper

Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?

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They actively avoid loan words from English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française#Anglicisms

Except weekend. They couldn't come up with a better word for that ;)

I use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages.

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.

For Portuguese at least it's most likely translating word-for-word. The term is "fim-de-semana" ("fim" rather than "final", and hyphens signifying a compound word)

Isn't it vacancelle in French? Never heard fin de semaine... although most just say le weekend.

I have never heard vacancelle in France. But le week-end all the time. Even my kid’s school teachers used it. “Bon week-end!” Never heard fin de semaine even among my old country neighbors in Provence. My anecdote doesn’t make it fact of course. Most French people I know don’t pay any attention to the Academie Française.

In German it's Wochenende (Woche = week, Ende = end), which is literally the literal translation. ... de.wiktionary.org tells me it was adopted from English, too, after World War I.

Huh. I did not know it was such a young word. :)

Ancient Romans just didn't use weeks, so the translation is probably a modern one. The closest to a weekend is a market day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

Kind of. TFA mentions this:

> 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.

The Academy encourages the avoidance of loan words, but very few people in France actually listen to the Academy. Spend ten minutes in any French tech company and the Academy goes out the window.

Octet is actually a more precise word as it implies there are 8 bits (or people, or things...)

Byte only represents a group of bits.

Technically true, and there were some weird-ass byte sizes in the early decades of computing, but the 8-bit byte has been universal for, I think, around 40 years now?

Gigaoctet isn't exactly a severe linguistic contortion though.

They haven't gotten over the whole "lingua Franca" thing.

Well, it will take the British and Americans a long time to go over the same thing as well when the time comes...

Get back to me in 20 years and we'll see how that went.

Who said it has to be in 20 years? It took a couple of centuries for the French.

>Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?

Probably because some French law mandates it.

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