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Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

> Disclaimer: word "cuda" is taken from Serbian language, it means "miracles".

This has to do with a Serbian word and not the Nvidia GPU programming language.

Weird, the actual serbian word is "čuda", pronounced "chuda", and they're completely ignoring the diacritics.

In Polish it’s actually “cuda”, without diacritics (same meaning). Regardless, one often ignores diacritics in writing in English/Western context. My last name has “ń”, though all the airlines insist to put “n” there; same with Western European banks. While for some words they maybe ambiguities if you skip the diacritics they are usually resolved by the context. Polish ppl are def used to read a text without diacritics and not surprised by this. (Of course a larger body text is a bit harder/slower to read, but it happens often when text messaging or in a Western context). I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that Serbian is similar.

> Regardless, one often ignores diacritics in writing in English/Western context

For example I think most people will write the name of the car make Škoda as Skoda.

I think a lot of this is because, especially historically, people outside Czechia etc didn't know how to type Š. It's an effect of English-speaking countries defining global standards for computers, aviation and so on.

Hypothetically, and with a little exaggeration to make the point, if Sweden had somehow had that global influence in the mid-20th century, the American actress "Raquel Welch" might have been stuck with "Rakuel Velch" in her passport, and Swedish people would wonder why she was annoyed by this.

And that's how, (in my head,) we ended up with the international spelling of "Česko" using the Polish "cz".

The “international” spelling is actually the English one. E.g. France and Germany respectively use “tch” and “tsch”, which correspond to the pronunciation in their languages.

It hindi language, chuda means 'get f*ckd'.

Writing ČudaText rather than CudaText would help clarify it's nothing to do with Nvidia.

Yeah, I went in thinking I'd see some kind of wild text editor implemented entirely on the GPU

Or an editor that somehow makes Cuda programming easier.

As a croat, I don't think this works. It didn't even cross my mind that it would be miracles, a) because it's plural, b) it's combined with the english word "text", c) would be more correct to spell it with 'ch' and not just drop the diacritic d) it's a noun and not an adjective which would be more suitable.

Cuda is a trademark of Nvidia. I expect the outcome to be the same as if it was named NvidiaText.

Nvidia doesn’t have any connection to text editors. Can Apple sue people for selling fruit under the name “apple”?

They've essentially done that and won, so.... Yeah?

There was a smallish apple producer (the fruit) that used a red apple with a bite taken out that lost the right to their logo. More recently there was another recipee startup with a pear logo that apple sued

What a broken system. The new blasphemies of the modern age are corporations overstretching into ownership of words representing things older than the language itself.

At least Google had the decency to invent a word (itself a derivative of a word invented by a child).

In the UK the cloud IaaS vendor Skyscape was forced to change name by a certain media company for only part of their name, in an unrelated field.

How about if you want to protect a trademark you don't use a word with real world meaning? What benefit does it give society to give these protections to extant words?

Also Microsoft OneDrive used to be known as Microsoft Skydrive and the same company objected.

Wouldn't be so bad if Sky had contributed anything useful to the world in the last twenty years.

Less sport on TV? Actually I do follow F1 through the Channel 4 highlights, but last weekend it was all live from Silverstone. I realised my life is too short for hours and hours (and hours) of coverage. The highlights are perfect. Sorry Sky.

They also sued polish company a.pl a few years ago because they said it sounds like 'apple' when you read it in english (.pl being of course polish TLD and it is read very differently than 'apple'). Not sure how this was resolved but the site is still up

I clicked thinking it was some NLP project that ran on the GPU.

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