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Comment by 2zcon | Hacker News Reader

>random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command.

>actually

Many native French speakers use 'actually' when they mean 'currently' because of the 'actuellement' false-cognate. This looks like the same mistake but neither Swedish nor Finnish have a word that looks like 'actually' when I machine-translate 'currently'.

Any ideas?

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I know nothing of Finnish, but, in poking around on Google translate, I found 'nykyinen', commonly translated as 'currently', but sometimes as 'existing'. To rephrase the sentence to say "there is no existing use..." would be a little awkward in English, but would convey the same message.

I felt that in this particular sentence, neither 'actually' nor 'currently' are necessary, but to be sure I wanted to check the context, only to find that this sentence is not currently to be found in the article.

Finn here. I don't think the use of "actually" comes from any Finnish expression specifically but it might be some sort of literary habit that stems from the desire to emphasize how things turned out to be. It's somewhat common in Finnish to say how things turned out, rather than that someone (or you) made it so.

Thinking about it, I might've used the word in a similarly redundant fashion myself occasionally.

Reads like fine English to me. The meaning is "really". As in, he had more favored name ideas, but they were taken.

I am a native Swedish speaker though, so I may share some language blindness with Linus.

>Many native French speakers use 'actually' when they mean 'currently' because of the 'actuellement' false-cognate.

It's also a false friend in German: "aktuell". Wiktionary states that the Swedish word is based on French or German [0]

"From French actuel, perhaps via German aktuell, from Late Latin actuālis, from Latin āctus + -ālis."

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aktuell#Swedish

I think you’re overthinking it. The first definition in the Oxford Dictionary for “actually” equates it with “really”, a substitution which works fine here.

1. as the truth or facts of a situation; really.

"we must pay attention to what young people are actually doing"

That's definitely a possibility I didn't give the proper consideration. On the other hand, if I wrote that sentence with that intention, I would strip 'actually' it for being unnecessary.

Overthinking? Well I can hardly characterise this tangent as important.

In Swedish we have the word "aktuell" which means current (in time).

Another anecdata from a Swedish native:

"Actually" is sometimes used purely for effect (affect?) without any reflection on the meaning of it, similar to how "ducking" is used.

I'm imagining "git" wasn't his first try at finding a unique TLA, and the actually is there to signal effort spent.

That sentence reads fine to me. Possibly for the reasons you listed, which then lead to that usage being common in the language.

Actually is also a false friend in Spanish.

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