When the French created a new word for, I dunno, "computer" or whatever, they didn't go back to Latin roots to figure out what it should be...or did they?
> From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”).
> In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in light of the possibilities of these machines (this is a very rare example of the creation of a neologism authenticated by dated letter).
The older, presumably preexisting definition is “one who performs an ordination ceremony”, which is entirely unrelated, so I’d expect that Perret did look back to Latin when coining it as a word for “computer”.
Edit: I’m wrong, it’s a bit more complicated than that. According to this source, the word was coined from a differently-spelled rare word, ordonnateur:
https://blogs.transparent.com/french/the-origin-of-lordinate...
Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages:
Scholars have always gone back to Latin to influence modern language. Most technological, scientific, and plenty of engineering terms, for instance, derive either from Latin or Greek.
Modern French didn't 'branch' from Latin so much as the Latin dialects in the areas that have since become modern France evolved from Latin into what it has since become. Therefore, going back to classical and vulgar Latin tells us a lot about how the language has evolved, what features still provide valuable meaning, allowing people to guess what a word means based on their existing base knowledge of the language.
Doubly so considering the French curriculum remains relatively old-fashioned compared to the Anglophone world, such that explicitly teaching grammatical concepts at a very young age has not yet gone out of fashion in France and other Francophone regions and nations), so that the general population has a firmer understanding of the derivation of terms, the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and so on.
Not only that, it allows the modern French language to maintain a sense of consistency by going back to the roots and origins of words in order to determine how best to coin new words without causing needless difficulty, having to create exceptions where unnecessary. Hello, English language, especially in the past hundred or so years with 'electrocution' where the most important part of one of its components, 'execution', is entirely missing (such that it's not clear just from looking at 'electrocution' that being killed, 'executed', is a key part of the word).
"yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur"
It isn't "elegant" if the public is "far more likely" to do it a different way.
"formes telles que professeure, recteure, sapeuse-pompière, auteure, ingénieure, procureure [..] sont contraires aux règles ordinaires de dérivation et constituent de véritables barbarismes"
So, it feels wrong to them, who know the derivation rules. Probably it feels slightly more obvious to those who don't.
"The first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”"
https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2015/the-etymology-of-the...
Yes, they used the Latin word with the closest meaning. It is the same etymology as "order" in English. They come up with a lot of official words for things, but in the streets a lot of them are ignored. Some stick in some regions while brands or borrowed words are used in some other region.
The ironic aspect is that the closer you get to Paris (seat of the a Académie), the more borrowed words are used. In Quebec, even this close to the USA, there isn't all that much borrowed words beside pieces that are directly imported from the US such as automobile parts and tools (because until the 70's, the labels were in English only).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ordinateur
Edit: ... 3 people replied at the same time, whatever.