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Comment by ksaj | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully they try out any names in Google Translate before choosing them. Kot can mean shit (German), meat (Swedish) and cat (Lots of languages, which is really good since the mascot looks a bit like a cat). Diacritics change the meaning quite a lot.

Little known infosec trivia: the BorderWare firewall was originally known as Janus, after the Roman god of gates, transitions, etc. But they changed the name to BorderWare (the company at the time was Border Network Technologies) when they discovered it was pretty much universally pronounced like Anus just about everywhere outside of North America.

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As far as I gather from that post the mascot has no name yet. Also as someone who natively speaks German, I don't see any problem with the name "Kotlin" and I never associated it with "Kot".

Suggesting that they use Google Translate to realize the additional meaning seems especially smug given the fact that they have a German translation of that post available.

I am referring to the mascot names people are suggesting, not Kotlin itself. Hence the future tense, and speaking of the mascot directly. No smugness - some of the suggestions translate to completely different things in other languages, and that is what I am pointing out.

I see why my recounting of BorderWare's product made you think that. It's related, but not the same story.

Oh, you are referring to the name suggestions in the comments below the blog post? Yeah. Something where "Kot" is a standalone word would definitely be an unfortunate name choice.

I read your post that way that you argued that "Kotlin" is a bad naming choice. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

On the other hand, Uniqlo means 'mixed-gender toilet' in German, but the clothing chain by that name seems to be doing fine there.

Can you reference that? As a german I can see how "Uniklo" can mean that, but never heard that and I would rather assume it's a university toilet if someone would use it. From searching I can't find anything related to the term, i.e. duden.de doesn't know it.

It's a joke I heard many years ago. Apologies if it's inaccurate.

There is always Assmann. I know them mostly due to their high quality industrial connectors. Siemens is also a dodgy sounding name in English.

The name comes from Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. Andrey Breslav mentioned that the team decided to name it after an island, just like Java was named after the Indonesian island of Java.

Any word is potentially offensive in another language. Western European languages are just a few out of thousands.

I was referring only to coming up with a name for the mascot. Not the name Kotlin itself. Besides, Kotlin actually sounds like a computer language name.

I had to think for a good ten seconds before realizing that you meant kött in Swedish.

> Hopefully they try out any names in Google Translate before choosing them

Or maybe a more reliable approach, e.g kot does not translate to meat in Swedish :)

It could mean bone without considering the diacritic comment. But I digress. IKEA has a Pruta line that I first misread as Prutta, so my Swedish is pretty unreliable already.

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