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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

Confusing name. "Borg" means "castle" or "fort" in Swedish but it seems that the name refers to the "Borg collective" from Star Trek The Next Generation. So, it is a derivative of a derivative name. I kind of miss when new discoveries where named after Latin words, being a Spanish speaker many of them had a sense of coherence with the language. Better than Sonic hedgehog protein, thou.

update: For all the downvotes, I recommend to read "How new words are born": https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe... The rules are, of course, not enforced by anyone but emerge from a common understanding of the language.

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Borg is short for Cyborg. Cyborg is a portmanteau of Cybernetic Organism. Cybernetic is from the Greek kybernetike, while Organism is from the Greek organismos.

You're happy now.

A person who makes a comment like that isn’t going to be happy with anything.

> A person who makes a comment like that isn’t going to be happy with anything.

Huh, I didn't realize that Google's Borg and Kubernetes projects had names that were related that way.

> You're happy now.

The problem still persists. The word only makes sense in the popular TV show reference as Cyborg is the actual short name for Cybernetic Organism. It would be like shortening Computer Language as ulang, not very meaningful and probably confusing.

Language has an arbitrary history, but it is molded by evolutionary mechanism. To add random words with little though makes communication more difficult.

For an Enlgish speaker to add Tok-Tik to their vocabulary is cumbersome, to add Tik-Tok is easy. Communication is hard enough to add new words without reason or rhyme.

Language changes. You'll get over it. Or maybe you won't, but the rest of the world will.

The only evolutionary mechanism for language is what gets used, not what makes sense to you. Your idea that "cyborg" is somehow special because that's the one contraction that makes sense to you just means you're not participating in that particular evolutionary language branch, not that it's an invalid branch.

> Language changes.

Not as much as it should, the predominance of orthographic corrector software can slowdown the pace of needed change.

The rule I see for Cybernetic Organism to cyborg is to take a syllable of one word and another of the other one. Similarly to Electronic Mail becomes email.

There is also a rule that when reading the first and last letters are the most important ones (something like this https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/)

So, I could be wrong and maybe there are other examples of words that are shortened by taking single letters from the middle of the word. English is not my mother tongue.

> So, I could be wrong and maybe there are other examples of words that are shortened by taking single letters from the middle of the word.

“Borg” derives from the already established “cyborg”, the letters are taken from the beginning (if you mean the elisions; the end if you mean the retained letters), not the middle.

Sorry you're being downvoted, I also strongly agree that new-word formation rules usually should be stricter for scientific purposes, and heuristics regarding prefixes and suffixes should apply.

There are cases that shorten words even worse (Richard to Rick to Dick by rhyming comes to mind), but all of these I know are colloquial.

There does feel like overall standards are lowered here.

> So, it is a derivative of a derivative name.

Most words in English (and a whole bunch of other languages) that aren't unchanged or one-step removed from Proto-Indo-European (and possibly those that are, since that's just as far back as we are kind of able to reconstruct) are either derivatives of derivatives or newer out-of-the-blue inventions (often derivatives of derivatives of inventions).

> For all the downvotes, I recommend to read "How new words are born"

But...the word you are complaining about is an example of #7 (followed by #4 for the use in question), from “cyborg”, so...your complaint about it beign abnormal is undermined by your own citation.

> So, it is a derivative of a derivative name.

Well that's how language works. Do you think those Latin names came out of nowhere? Or do you think they're themselves derived from Italic languages and other sources?

The Latin is known, stable, and a common ancestor for Spanish and English speakers.

So is Greek, where we got the roots of cybernetic and organism.

I think “Borg” comes from “Cyborg” which comes from “Cybernetic Organism.”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cyborg

> update: For all the downvotes, I recommend to read "How new words are born": https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe...

Right… so isn’t this ‘4 Repurosing’? They’ve done what your article describes.

From the original paper they hint that the name comes from the "assimilated" feature, which does seem like a star trek reference after all.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27870406

They didn’t hint, it says it explicitly in the article… inspired by her son to use Star Trek references for naming things.

Borg... sounds swedish?

ST first contact

So borg is swedish after all!

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