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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

> But does this mean a different way of experiencing life?

What is noticeable, at least for me, is a different approach to naming things. E.g. in German technical things are usually named by what they are or do (descriptive), while in English many things are just named "randomly" after e.g. people or who/where it was first used. Consider: Elastitizätsmodul vs. Young's modulus; Steilkegel vs NMTB taper; Tellerfeder vs Belleville washer; ...

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A lot of things in English are also named as to what they do, but they are disguised because we tend to use Greek and Latin. I remember when I was learning German I found it amusing that the Germans call a television "ein Fernseher" -- literally a far-seer. But then I thought about what television means! It's tele (far) + vision!

The Germain "ein Ferhseher" is likely just a literal translation of the English "television", being a 20th century technological invention.

This. Trying to categorically distinguish between English and German words gets more difficult when a lot of modern terminology just gets shipped over as loan words.

But what makes German a little different is that they translate the loan words using their own roots. No doubt Fernseher is taken from television, but compare it to Spanish "televisión" -- there they literally took the word.

Some loan words are, some aren't. Certainly a lot of them do get properly translated, and it's always fun to see what sticks.

The level of humour I experience from spoken Spanish (especially on day-to-day conversation) is on another level compared to English. This is solely based on some words/phrases sounding way more funny in Spanish than in English. Can't think of any examples, but generally a quick 2-3 word phrase in Spanish will carry some (intended) funny-ness to it, whereas in English, the joke is on the meaning of the words rather than the sound and expression of it.

My English comprehension level is comparable to native speakers, so it's not because I'm missing any jokes. This is not to say I don't enjoy comedy in English, in fact, I seem to enjoy it as much as anyone else.

I was thinking about this as well, words and phrases carrying certain emotions etc. But it might be just that as a non-native speaker, I am not attuned to it so it's harder to pick up on. I think it's definitely there though.

> But does this mean a different way of experiencing life?

it does mean.. "paying attention to different things in life". Culture and language are ying-and-yan, either one shapes the other. Like, when same word means very different things, vs when there are plenty of words/constructs for some nuances that might be hard-to-differ for a foreigner. Whether the former means "we dont care about that", or just the opposite, "we do know that so well that it is obvious", i dont know..

I think it's the general tendency of English to be "hieroglyphic", like Chinese. English spelling teaches this approach early on: some logic it there, but you can't rely on it and still have to memorize, not infer. Then memorizing names, instead of logically inferring / producing them, becomes natural.

But conversely, we have X-rays vs Röntgenstrahlung.

Neither of those are especially descriptive. X tells you no more than Röntgen does.

When programming, I name all my functions after myself ;)

This reminds me of someone who named all of his variables after vegetables... I wouldn't want to inherit that product

Unless its a salad app. `toss(lettuce, tomatoes)`

Actually I use this in one particular case: in Android there is an event callback "onActivityResult" and it's first parameter is integer. In all demos online you see officially looking name like SDCARD_WRITE_PERMISSION and when noobs copy paste it and try to compile it they can't find in which library it is defined, so when in demo code I use BANANA it's little bit more obvious that they have to define it yourself. But MY_SDCARD_WRITE_PERMISSION also works.

Banana makes it obvious that it's not official and on which two places it is connected together.

Had a consultant developer once who named his functions like doMagic() & doStuff()

A legitimately very talented developer that I worked with showed me some of his first code at the company that contained `function post_document_load_do_shit` and `var turd`

More of a young male thing than anything to do with ability.

I do this if it's not production code. It's memorable, and it's even semantic in some cases.

In C++, many things carry the STD prefix.

fortunately it's std not STD. The first looks like nothing in particular, the latter looks like S&M kaomoji.

sexpresso_std

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