Comment by realugglan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by realugglan | Hacker News Reader

Around ten years ago I worked as an instructor teaching people programming here in Sweden. My company decided I did such a good job they would send me over to their parent company in the UK to teach some classes there. I knew the material by heart so, no problem, I thought.

I quickly discovered, right in front of the class at the white board with marker in hand, with my first " { " written, that being fluent in English was NOT the same as being fluent in Spoken Programmer English.

My second realization was that almost nobody in the United Kingdom spoke a dialect of English that I could comprehend, but that's another story.

Bonus info: { } are called commonly called måsvingar/seagull wings in Swedish, which really gave me no hint at all what to call them in English.

Swedish also has a funny name for the @-sign, named after the trunk of an elephant. In fact, quite a few languages do. Here's a short sample from the Wikipedia article:

In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant. In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sign is known as "papaki" meaning small duck. In Slovenian, the most common word for it is "afna", colloquially meaning "monkey", much like in Polish. In Hungarian, it is called "kukac" meaning "caterpillar".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#Names

And in the Netherlands, we call it a ape's tail (we use 'ape' both for monkeys and ape's.)

In Poland it's very often simply called "ape" (often giving e-mail addresses), before I often heard "elephant's ear".

Some people in Germany call it 'Klammeraffe', which would roughly translate as 'an ape that clings to something' or 'spider monkey'.

Finns often call it "miumau" (meow meow) because it looks like a cat's tail.

Hungarians call it "kukac" = worm because it also looks like a worm.

I think I'm going to start calling it cygnus because it looks like the accretion disk of a black hole.

And also in Romania.

Witch makes overheard conversations quite weird, since apenstaart is quite a long word: «yea, that is em-dot-dee-ee-vee-ar-eye-ee-es monkeytail hotmail-dot-com»

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