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I work with French programmers, so that opens an entire other can of worms. Colon becomes "two points" and semi-colon becomes "point comma".

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Yeah, German calls them "Doppelpunkt" (double point or double period) and "Strichpunkt" (and "Strich" is normally a dash, so dash-point or dash-period, depending on how you want to translate "Punkt").

Perhaps double-full-stop and stroke-full-stop. Those sound kinda British to me.

As a French speaker it make total sense to me; it just describes it.

I just searched quickly how to explain that the semi-colon is somehow half a colon. I couldn't find anything.

I'm not a French speaker, but those terms make perfect sense to me also, even though I've only just heard them here for the first time.

Maybe it has to do with the amount of time you pause when reading aloud? You pause for less time at a semi-colon then at a "full" colon.

Being French, I still find these names way better (as in clearer and more understandable for a foreigner) than the English ones. Why is ":" called a "colon"? That makes no sense!

It's from classical Greek/Latin rhetoric. In at least some grammarians' writings, there are grammatical units called the 'period', 'colon', and 'comma' (in decreasing order of granularity). The names became applied to punctuation separating those units as well.

Although, confusingly, I believe the English semicolon functions more similarly to the punctuation associated with a Greek/Latin colon.

Is the difference between ":" and ".." when pronounced obvious in French? In German, I'd say "Doppelpunkt" and probably "Punkt, Punkt," respectively.

It is pronounced almost exactly the same way (deux-points, point point) in french Canada. "Double-point" is valid according to Wikipedia, but I've never heard it before.

".." does not exist in French typography, we have the Points de suspension: "...", instead.

I'd like to add that it is wrong to think about commas, semi-colons, etc. in terms of duration of a pause in the speech. These signs articulate written sentences' syntax, and it sometimes relate to pauses when read aloud, but it is not a bijection. When analysing recordings, J. Drillon (Traité de la ponctuation française) showed that the correlation is really weak.

In fairness, the context of all this is ASCII characters, especially in the context of programming, not typography in human language. Various programming languages use ".." for expressing ranges. I think most (western) languages use the ellipsis "…" for the purposes you mention, which is actually typographically subtly different than 3 full stops.

And in Hebrew, double colon is literally something like 'four dots'.

Leads to some interesting PHP errors, like: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

that totally makes sense to me, it is either a pair of points and a pair of a comma and a point.

Of course, that may be cause it's exactly the same in my native italian.

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